I donated a chocolate mint sprig yesterday. It’s planted next to the tea plants. Incidentally, it looks like the basal plants are dying, and maybe the tea plants are, too.
I noticed the chocolate mint sprig and was delighted to see it!
Thanks for your contribution!
I checked on the basil a few days ago and it seems that when I tried to put the cuttings into the media I didn’t get them buried in far enough and they fell over and pulled away from the growing solution.
One was lost, but the basil in the far left grow box seems to be alright. Concerning the tea plants, a similar problem happened to one of them, but if you inspect the other two closely you’ll find them sprouting out fresh green growth!
Everything is slow growing right now because we’re starting with cuttings. When I first began aquaponics and did my proof of concept system with some common house ivy I was initially unimpressed by the slow growth for weeks. It wasn’t until I was inspecting the system and noticed that my cutting, while not growing where I could see it, had spread roots all throughout the grow bed!
I expect what we have now to look rather depressing for a while until it can establish a good root system to really take in nutrients.
The mint should do well; I haven’t been able to kill it, despite some really inept moves. From one sprig that didn’t die a few years ago, I now have a few square feet of chocolate mint plants, and it’s self-propagating.
I also could donate a strawberry plant, if you think we would have room for that.
I regret that my donations are haphazard. I’d like for us to focus our efforts into ways of producing as much high-quality food in as little space as possible. One project I’d like to try is coming up with something suitable for compact, self-contained environments, such as might be found aboard ships, submarines, Antarctic research stations and space outposts. I’m also curious what is the minimum amount of plant necessary to grow fruiting bodies; is it possible to grow a watermelon without the vine?
I think it might be helpful to come up with a plan and a list of plants that would be good projects. What are the best plants (and animals) for our purposes?
I think another bio meeting would be a good place to discuss what we want to grow.
Originally I was thinking of growing a Salsa Garden just to get things started. The tea plants are really interesting though and I’d toyed with the idea of making a tea garden.
With the mints and other herbs we might be able to make ourselves some rockin’ teas.
I have the Square Foot Gardening book and I’ve been interested in applying square foot principles to aquaponic media beds. One thing is for sure, we’re going to have to probably wait till after thanksgiving at least to get some real progress done. This next week is going to be vacation and family time for me. I imagine similar stuff for most of us.
I’ll keep you posted!
Re tea plants - they are extremely hard to clone to root and I don’t expect those to survive. Have been trying techniques for about a year. I thought I would try, though, putting some in some rock wool and placing them in the grow media. Those little sprouts may have been there when they were planted.
This is one of the reasons that tea plants are quite expensive and not commonly found. They are very hard to grow from seeds and I haven’t found the way to clone them. They are camelias but there aren’t any advertised ways of cloning them.
So . . . if the don’t make it, it’s no reflection on the AP setup. But if they do, I will be impressed. We’ll see!