What to do with mint

Our Mint Eradicator
This past summer I havent spent much time in my garden. I was out of the country for work several times, a family member passed away, and I had a big project that caused any number of late nights.

In the mean time, my aquaponic garden grew like gangbusters. Unfortunately, I let a friend give me some mint. Shes a kind-hearted soul who hates to let any living thing die.

Luckily for me, my daughter acquired a rabbit this fall named Silver. Hes a chinchilla colored rex buck (for those of you who know rabbit terms). Luckily for me, Silver loves mint. So I can pull it out in big handfuls and hell happily munch it down. We have enough mint from this past summer to keep Silver happy for quite a long time yet to come.

My last post was about making emergency lights for Hurricane Sandy. Luckily, our power didnt go out for long and the storm passed us by. I had a chance to spend a long weekend up in New York helping clean up homes in Queens, which was hit particularly hard by the storm.

Hope you have a great holiday season! Ill be back posting about aquaponics again in the new year. Greenhouses, solar heaters, and more!

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Sincere Flattery

I spent a few minutes today catching up on favorite youtube channels and blogs. In the process, I stumbled across a video that looked unusually similar.

There was the bulkhead fitting created out of electrical conduit connectors. The standpipe had the Affnan-style flared mouth I figured out how to make out of standard US plumbing fixtures. The bell on the siphon had the same cap and a series of slots sliced into the base, as Id done.

On the other hand, I didnt see a media guard. And instead of using the single 45 degree connector to exploit the coanda effect to form the siphon-starting water plug, the author of the video had a traditional 90 degree connector, but with a 45 degree connector at the end. From a hydrodynamic point of view, the 45 degree connector at that location wouldnt do anything useful. The video creator didnt cite any prior influences on his design, so its not clear if he even knew his "design" was completely derivative of what Id posted. Then again, he didnt repeat my faux pas of calling a standpipe an "upstand." ::blush::

Its not like I do any of this for money or even fame. I really do just want to make aquaponics accessible to the maximum number of people. But it was surprising to see myself so completely copied, if copied imperfectly. Heavens knows Ive learned much of what I know about aquaponics because of the generosity of individuals who made their information available on the internet. But there are a couple of ideas that werent out there before I posted them.

Im reminded of a wonderful poem my mother wrote. In later life she went back to college to complete a Bachelors Degree. In one of her college textbooks, she found her poem, attributed to "Anonymous."

The Gardener
by Pat Chiu

If you were a gardener, your child the seed,
Your task it would be to nurture and weed
way wild things that threaten distruction and strife
and prepare the young plant for the rigors of life.

But a daisys a daisy. A rose is a rose.
The child must be true to its form as it grows.
True to the form from the maker sent
And not to the will of the gardener bent.

There are so many people to whom I owe my understanding of aquaponics. And in some cases they may have been leveraging knowledge from others of whom I never knew. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

May those whove learned from my little contributions go on to further the journey. Upward, towards more effective and efficient systems, and forward, towards ever-more affordable ways of doing this kind of gardening.

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