Backyard Project

Sometimes I need to remind myself that life is a marathon! We are constantly subjected to people showing us how amazing there lives are through there social media. Yes they might be doing more than us but we don't and will never know the real story like we know our own.

So right now my life is a juggling act between paying off my debt and using the spare cash I have to enrich my families life. Unfortunately often this means we focus on improveing our house or personal space which are not enviable events. This year we have focused on decorating our down stairs, building the aquaponics system and improving our outside space for the summer. I have really enjoyed being outside with both my boys they have absolutely loved spending the last week with me outside while laying our paving, now I love the feeling of giving my family a place to sit in the sun 

It is really rewarding doing stuff for yourself before I got on this path I would have always got someone to do everything for me. This is not how it should be we should live to the standard of our own skill. With the introduction of the internet there is nothing you can learn to do, sometimes its just about the effort required to do it. This patio took me two weeks on my own I shovel about 8 tons of solid and replaced it with 6 tons of sand and stone, it was back breaking work but it's done now so the hard work has all been forgotten.

I now have a mountain of soil I need to find a home for again it's my waste so I want to find a way to get rid of it.

 So my father in law decided to build some raised flower beds around his paving luckily for me he live around the corner and said I could fill them with the earth from my build. 15 wheelbarrows later it looks like I hardly touch the mound. The raised beds look really good so I decided to make my own. These should help get rid of some of the soil

Which finished of the paved area nicely and got rid of a few barrows of earth.

To use up the last of the solid and make sure of some old pallets I made this large corner raised bed. It will probably take me 5 years to fill this garden but I cant wait to start laying out the bed.

Again not exciting but its has been hours of constructive entertainment and when it comes to planting that will be an opportunity for the rest of the family to get stuck in. I started this blog post as I was bored but while writing about it I realised it's not boring it's just different, and if you stop and think about it even a seemingly mundane period can yield a interesting result.

Our food, where is it from

So I decided to track where our food comes for one month, as a first step into deciding our carbon footprint.

Below I have listed all the items we bought fresh over a 4 week period

European produce
Baby spinach,  bell peppers, strawberries, avocado, cucumbers, lettuce, asparagus
Bacon, gammon ham, fish and prawns

British produce
Onions, mushrooms, potatoes, cabbage,
Pork shoulder joint, pork chops, mince, chicken, eggs
Bread
Milk, cheese, yoghurt, cream

Other counties
Raspberries, Apples, Oranges,

It is clear as a country we don't produce enough of the greenhouse crops. This is probably because it is easier just to truck them in from Europe, this will hopefully change when the country leaves the EU as it will need to create a domestic industry that can compete.
Interestingly all the families stables meat, milk, bread and green vegetables are grown in the UK. It is only what I would class as our luxury vegetables, the vegetables that are not in the current season that come from Europe and further. This is a great sign as the more I look the more I find how much is actually made in the UK.

I'm surprised that we eat a lot of locally grown produce, we shop a lot with price in mind and it makes me happy to see that produce from the UK is competing with the European countries. Now I think this has a lot to do with eating with the seasons as when it comes to fruit and veg I always buy the cheapest Items and they naturally seem to the produce that is in season right now and predominantly locally sourced.
Maybe it is time to start a revolution of eating with the seasons as opposed to eating what we want when we want. It would be interesting if a health institution did a study on people eating habits over a period of 5 years to see if eating the majority of our food with the seasons, what type of affect that would have on health. I defiantly believe it would improve the health of the nation as in the summer months, when we are more active we will eat an array of high calorie fruits and vegetables. Then as we approach the winter months when our activity slows, we would be eating the brassicas and other longer term greens with the root based vegetables that keep. Again eating with the season and making our own food from raw materials inevitably will remove the additives and sugars and syrups used by commercial food producers to improve the shelf life and palatability of their products.

Supermarkets are money making machines and designed for making a profit, they place their product in carefully structured manners to attract their target audiences. High sugar cereals are always low to attract children and luxury and impulse purchases are always at the end of the isles. I'm looking to change the way I shop, by cutting out the middlemen in an attempt to buy my produce where possible from the producers themselves. It is our responsibility to create a balance in the world if we support our local producers they will produce more or even better we can encourage more people to start producing their own produce.

Backyard farm

I started preparing for this blog in January 2019, as part of my continued walk towards a simple and environmentally conscious life.
Our eating habits before we started this journey in July 2018 was one of convenience. Now we plan our meals, prep our food and try where possible to cook with fresh ingredients. Even though we are eating more natural food, the damage we cause to people and the environment are higher than we ever thought!
My goal is to construct a back yard aquaponics system/chicken coop and grow food, both vegetable and animal in a small area of my garden taking up eight square meters of my garden as the productions area.

With this project, I have 3 main goals

1. Improve the quality of the food my family eats
2. Reduce the cost of our food on the environment
3. Be sustainable and efficient

1. Improve the quality of the food we eat.

Price often dictates the quality of the food we eat, I often make choices on price which should never be a consideration when trying to feed your family with good quality and healthy food. Food is a natural resource and we should know everything we can know about the food we eat. Our ancestors fed their families with the seasons, we chose an easier way of life chained to our desks and eating process food. I want my children to eat the best healthiest food, I know I cant produce everything in my backyard but its a start. 

2. Reduce the cost of food.

This goal has nothing to do with the actual cost of the food we eat, and everything to do with the cost of getting our food from the farm to the table. Its about the effect all our food has on the environment, from pesticides and other chemicals to greenhouse gas and land degradation.
My aim is to remove the use of pesticides and other chemical fertilisers from the food we eat and ensure the water used to create our food is not damaged or wasted in any way.
Remove the CO2 footprint from our food, no transportation and no packaging.
By achieving this to any degree will make a difference, by writing about it and sharing it with people in my eyes is a small step to making the world better. Even is one person tries it I feel its a step in the right direction, if my children grow up being thoughtful about the environment and the effect they have on it I have created a catalyst for change.

3. Be sustainable and efficient. 

Everything about this setup needs to promote sustainability and efficiency. The fish will need to breed and repopulate as we consume the larger fish, the plants need to be let go to seed and the seeds need to be kept for future years. Water needs to be reused and new water must only come from rainwater collection. Power used must be created from solar power and battery, the control system needs to be 100% automatic
Fish will be fed using a maggot farm constructed as part of the build, duckweed and insects larve grown in additional tanks in the future.

Design.


 CHOP System (constant height one pump), there are two 850l usable IBC's where the fish are kept the water from the 6 grow beds drains into these fish tanks bringing the cleaned water back to the tanks. The tanks overflow to a line and channels the dirty water (contaminated ammonia and nitrate enriched water) to a holding tank. All 3 IBC tanks are fed air continuously this helps the fish and the plants. For 15 minutes every hour the pump operated and sends the dirty water to the grow beds for the plants and the bacteria to clean. The pump delivers the water up a central line with six branches going to each grow-bed, the flow is controlled by ball valves to ensure that the water flow is sufficient to full the grow bed and activate the syphons but not too much to cause the grow bed to flood.
There are two types of grow-bed in this system media filled and deep water culture. I don't know the benefits of either however I plan to use the grow-bed with media to grow the plants that are not regularly replaced like strawberries, raspberries, rhubarb and herbs, while the DWC beds will grow the fast-growing and seasonal plants like all the salad items and chillies.

Media filled grow-beds before planting.

Media filled grow-beds after first plant

DWC bed before planting

DWC bed after planting

Pump and flow reducing line to control flow to grow-beds without increasing pressure on the pump. Pump has a built-in level switch a necessity to ensure your pump is safe



First fish, common carp which I chose because they are indigenous to our country and they can be good eating according to articles I have read, they can taste muddy but being as this system has no mud there is not much chance of that. According to my research back in the Victorian era carp was a stable food source.



 Looking to the future

This system is full of possibility as the fish get bigger and I get all the grow beds full of food, I believe I can definitely feed my family all their vegetable requirements during the peak seasons. Due to the fact, the plants are not competing for water they can be planted closer together allowing more plants per square meter than conventional gardening. Additionally, our yearly fish intake can be grown in these tanks, convincing my family to eat the fish is a different challenge for a different blog post.
As for the system, this is the first prototype and providing it is successful I aim to build bigger and better systems in the future to maximise my use of my little space. There are already a few learning already made that will definitely be used when constructing the next one. 

Uniseals, these should be used for each penetration to ensure a water tight seal. It's a pity I only discovered these after the build these would have definitely  improved to build.

Grow bed depth, I built the beds 330mm deep but these are too deep they hold too much water and media resulting in high loads 200mm bed depth would have been better.

However, the next operation is to build the greenhouse around it and install heating and grow lights. Power usage will always fall within the power constraints of the solar panels for power.