My wife and I have been fans of the "The Good Life" (aka "Good Neighbors") for many years. We thought it was a real 'hoot' when we found this site along with the Avatars.
Last year we started our first backyard garden...with 6 raised beds. We decided to try the organic approach. We learned a lot! We even produced nearly a ton of our own compost over the course of the year.
Last fall we constructed an 8'x8' greenhouse covered with 6MIL plastic. In addition we added 7 larger raised beds (4'x10'). Our focus with gardening this year is twofold: heirloom seeds for the purpose of planting mostly with our own seeds in 2012...and edible landscaping in the front yard. We have a strawberry bed along with several raspberry plants that we added last summer.
Our latest project is with aquaculture. We set up a 150 gallon tank, stocked with 20 test fish (goldfish) and a grow bed with tomatos and lettuce. We added the fish last night...and this morning they were all alive.
Once we've gone through a learning curve we intend to replace the goldfish with channel catfish and tilapia.We upgraded our compost area over the weekend with a 3 bin system made of free pallets.
Next I will tackle the issue of heating two 30 gallon barrels in the greenhouse with warm/hot water. I hope to build my first backyard solar collector on the cheap. The goal is to heat the barrels by day...allow the heat inside them to radiate inside the greenhouse at night. The temperatures are still hitting below freezing here in SC.
That's what we've done and what we hope to do in 2011.
I've started recording videos of what we've done. You can do this search in Google to find us on youtube. inurl:youtube.com +cppprogramming. That's our youtube user name.
I'm looking forward to reading through the forum postings.
Regards,
Chuck
(thanks)
