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Following last weekend’s adventures with timber (cutting the legs for the stands and the fish tanks), The steel rails for the top of the growbed stands is now here. Luckily it’s cut to size, so now I just need to finish the legs off, drill some holes, and assemble the things.
Easy 
We’re making slow and steady progress on the polytunnel now. We had put off doing all the timber work while we dug the beds inside the tunnel, and got all of the aquaponics system ready. However, with the delay we’ve had sorting out the stands for the aquaponic growbeds we decided to get the timberwork all done and the polythene up. At least that way we’ll have somewhere warm to garden as the weather gets chillier!
So we had a good go at the timber on the weekend – building doors (one large at the back, double doors at the front), door frames, and the timber rails that go around the bottom to attach the polythene to. We didn’t quite get it all done – the rails still have to be attached to the bottom of the polytunnel – but we do now have doors, and door frames attached to the tunnel. It’s starting to look almost finished! While it’s taken us a while we haven’t had any problems following the instructions – good job by First Tunnels.
We’ve been a bit silent on progress on the Aquaponics recently. Not because stuff isn’t happening – quite the reverse! We’ve been so busy digging holes for the sumps and designing the growbed stands that we haven’t had a chance to tell you about it.
Here’s the hole for the large sump. It was only supposed to be 500mm deep but at the soil is so good and “easy” to dig I decided to take it down lower – to nearly 900mm. This should allow us to grow plants in the sumps as they’ll all get a bit more light.
And here’s the sump in place:
Having got a little over-keen on the digging for the main sump I then had to drop the other two shallow sumps to the same level. The’re not as deep though, so only about 400mm of digging for these ones:
And here they are, both in place:
Now I just have to connect the three sumps together and we’ll be ready for the growbed stands.
Looking back on it, digging these has been a labour of love. In a lot of ways I’d have been better off designing the system to have them all above ground. However my aim with this system is to get the most use as possible out of the space – so we’ll be trying to grow duckweed, water chestnuts, and possibly taro or wild rice in the sumps to give us true multi-level growing.
Maybe I should have just hired a little digger for the day. Or some Navvies!
