Compliment Success: Mitigating Wasted Time In The Future

Hi friends,

The right frame of mind when thinking about time management is to do anything necessary today to prevent overwhelming yourself in the future. If you could carry out all the necessary steps to anticipate, prepare and take actions for a better future, then your time will be managed well.

So in the spirit of time management, I did some up keeping on my aquaponics system. After my first experience of harvesting my water spinach, I knew that I wouldn't be happy if I have to go through the same thing again in the future. This is because harvesting them took a long time to do so. Due to the poor planning of the position of my crops on the growbed, it gets very hard to cut them for harvesting because it was all over the place. They were also entangled with each other so that might risks wounding other plants that I don't intend to harvest.

So I decided to get rid of almost all of the water spinach and to make a more proper planting layout for the plants on my growbed. Here are the things that I know I had to do when approaching this activity.

I know that I have to pluck the water spinach out from the roots to prevent any of them growing back again.
I should only clean just the general upper layer of the beads so that the bottom layers where all the useful bacteria that converts the necessary nutrients remains.
I also know to rearrange the plants according to the direction of sunlight. Smaller plants face towards the sunrise while bigger plant like my cherry tomato should face the sunset. This is because germinating plants doesn't require intense sunlight.
Put a support net to help indeterminate type plants to crawl upwards.

Essentially, those are the things that I did and having firsthand experience doing so is so satisfying. Here some bullet points on the things that I've learned.

I understand now why people put a septic tank in between the fish tank and growbed. There is A LOT of fish waste accumulated in the growbed since the water from the fish tank is directly introduced into it. As a result, when I dig deeper into the clay beads, I could see murky water at the bottom. Having a septic tank helps segregate the solid waste substance and nutrient rich water before they are introduced into the growbed.
Just like planning to buy a real estate, the most important thing is location. The next important thing is location. And the third most important thing is location. To be specific, the location of sunlight and planting germinating seeds are important to ensure proper organization. Part of the reason why the overflow to the fish tank was very slow was because the roots from the water spinach was blocking the direct water flow to the overflow tube. After removing all the water spinach and its roots, the flow into the fish tank is better now.
Ornaments is unnecessary. I put a burger ornament on the growbed just to add some personality to the system but it disintegrated after receiving lots of splashes of water. As a result, small bits and pieces of it might cause some inconvenience in the future as it might cut my fingers when cleaning the clay beads or it could also clog pipes.

After all this, the positive outcome from this activity is that I know I will save more time in the future. I will no longer spend a lot of time harvesting my plants because they are all separated into their own designated areas. Thanks for reading friends! Here's some photos of the latest update on my aquaponics.