Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Here is half of the over 31kg of cherries I picked yesterday.


It's been a difficult season- so dry and quite a few days of 37-41C in November cooked many of the cherries that were close to ripe at the time on some trees. Unfortunately that was some of the larger early fruit Quite a few of the trees have had stacks of small fruit, and I've uncovered them to let the birds eat it, which saves me the time taken to pick it all- small fruit is slow going when picking! I did put about 2500l of AP water into the ground around one group of trees, it vanished without trace, but it did help with fruit size. 50mm of rain in the past few days means that splitting and mould could well be an issue if I don't get the final 5 trees picked quickly.

Ahhh, yum. cherries have never worked for us

Cherries have always worked for me, I accept them whenever I can get them. My AP trees grew tremendously last year, but I did not see any fruit.

Let me know when yr next door neighbours house goes up for sale! Good job Gordon and good luck with the rest.

There's one for sale 2km down the road right now
No picking this evening due to storms, but I did finish picking a couple of trees this morning, one of them had 26.6kg in total. More solar powered cherry preserving with syrup and brandy is in order tonight, and I might even put some brandy into the jars

Well I hope it is home made brandy, brandy is so expensive these days!

Fortunately there has not been any really hot weather recently, this graph covers midnight 25/11 - midday 7/12/2014.



I found some of my old blended ox heart + pellet mix in the freezer a couple of days ago, and have found that the Murray Cod really go for big (~20+g) chunks of it, eating all it much faster than they eat pellets. When one bites off a big piece and swims away with it, others follow it and try to bite off any that is hanging out of its mouth. I think I might have to make up some more of this mix, to get them eating greater quantities, and hopefully growing faster.

What do you do with that many cherries?

Looks awesome!

I always do a bit of this, so we have cherries all year



I wont make any jam this year, as I still have plenty left from last year, but will make some cherry cordial with some of the smaller fruit that I couldn't be bothered cutting in half and pipping. Maybe I'll make a couple of cherry pies too, if I have time. Of course we eat heaps of them ourselves and give some away to family and friends.
However, we sell most of them, either via a Saturday morning organic market where my wife works, or, and my wife is 20km away on the highway doing it now, selling from the roadside. She sold 22kg yesterday, and took a similar amount with her this morning. I started picking tree #20 this morning and have 6kg so far, but there are a stack more to pick on it. Storage space is a problem, we really need a spare large fridge for spring-summer fruit harvest. If there are just to many cherries to shift, I put 1kg bags of them in the freezer, which I can use in cooking later.

Another 12mm rain in the gauge this morning, and more forecast this week, so splitting might be an issue soon, unless I can get them all picked in time.

My wife sold 32kg of cherries in 90 mins from the roadside on Wed, making over 110kg sold in 4 days, so that just left me with a few kg to preserve. I did a few jars worth today, with extra brandy , and I'll turn most of the remainder of mostly small fruit into cordial. Despite 76mm of rain in the last week of harvesting, there was almost no splitting or mould. Now the apricots are ripe 2 or 3 weeks before normal...

The Murray Cod were behaving strangely today, not many coming up to eat when I put some Blood Worms in the tank as they usually do (and I put in a lot), and this arvo they were swimming around really fast and not eating when I put in some finely chopped ox heart.
I tested the water: Ammonia, 0 Nitrite 0, and Nitrate close enough to zero, so its not a water chemistry issue. Ph6.26, was a bit low, but only 0.03 under yesterday, ie essentally the same, so I added 60g of KOH.

The water temp is a bit lower than in recent weeks, maybe they were exercising to keep warm
Anyway, I'll see how they are behaving tomorrow.

My kids were doing the same. Maybe it's a moon thing. I didn't throw any liver their way but if they keep it up tomorrow I might.

Definitely not related to Full Moon then, its 3rd quarter

I've been wondering how many Murray Cod I have left, I thought there were perhaps 70 or 80 last time I counted a few months ago, so I had another count by torch light tonight, (since I was out and about running around the paddock looking for the 2 foxes that tried to kill some chooks).
There seems to have been quite a large increase in average weight, associated with a large decrease in the numbers of small fish, a decrease I've been aware of for some time, and I reckon there might be only 35 or 40 left, although it is hard to count with a rippled water surface.
I guess I'll keep losing the smallest ones as they become as one with the large ones, as I don't have any way to grade them into separate tanks.

What do you grow and sell other than cherries, Gunna? Sorry if you have mentioned previously.

Organically grown eggs in the only other thing on a regular basis, other than a bit of excess from the AP every now and then, such as chard/silverbeet. We sell a few blackberries and have pick your own days in summer too. The apricots I'm harvesting ATM, and other fruit, I mostly preserve to give us a year-round supply. My wife does a bit of plant propagation and sells the small plants, such as grapes, strawberries -I have runners everywhere in the AP ATM.