We skipped a couple weeks of our HAP posts, in part because we were busy with non-homesteading-related stuff, and in part because weve been doing a bit of twiddling our thumbs waiting for the dirt to dry out enough to plant the garden. But theres still plenty to be happy about!
First off, the wild greens in the yard are loving all the rain. We havent planted any greens in the garden yet, but we sure havent had to leave the yard for our vegetables! You may have guessed from the last couple posts that weve been eating a lot of dandelion greens and sorrel (and youd be correct), but the mallow (in the picture) has also been a valuable addition to our plates.
The hops plant came back! And its already as big as it got last year! Hopefully it will help the bees battle varroa, although we dont have too strong of hopes that the bees will self-treat.
One leaf on our rhubarb was almost completely eaten by slugs (we think), and the stalk had come partially disconnected. So we picked it the rest of the way, making this little 4" morsel is the first rhubarb weve harvested from the plant. It made one bowl of oatmeal very awesome.
Judging by the number of volunteer potatoes that came up this spring, we need to do a better job harvesting next year (although volunteer veggies that made it through the winter are always kind of fun) . They got knocked back a bit by a Mothers Day snowstorm, but theyre pushing on now. We pulled out a couple that were in this years garden beds, but the ones that came up in what are now aisles will get to do what they want for the summer. For the ones we had to move, we dug the best specimens into the compost bin to see what theyd do, since last year we had a regular old russet potato from the store sprout in the compost and survive the summer to actually produce a pound or two of potatoes. That was a nice surprise!
One nice thing about all this rain is that its made it really easy to pull weeds. The strawberries needed it bad, and we happily removed all the quack grass in there.
We did take the risk of turning over a couple beds to get the onions and sweet potatoes planted since they really needed to get in the ground. Hope they do ok!
Some of the first wildflowers (not including dandelions) are also starting to bloom. These guys are in with some roses that are looking a little deficient in iron or nitrogen. We havent seen any bees on these blooms yet...
...but they are working on the chives that got ahead of us! This little gal was so into it, she started probing the next flower while she was still standing on the first one! Good work, ladies.
"Our goal includes bringing the perspective of the United Nations to our Dominican Family and to support global action for justice and peace nationally." -Dominican Leadership Conference
Sister Margaret Mayce, OP, the NGO (non-governmental organization) representative for the Dominican Leadership Conference at the UN, is the featured speaker at the monthly presentation sponsored by the Dominican Ecclesial Institute (D+E+I) in Albuquerque on Sunday, October 25, 1:00 -3:00 PM,UNM Continuing Education Building, 1634 University Blvd. NE (map).
The topic of Sister Margarets address is "Sustaining God’s Creation," continuing with the D+E+Is reflections on Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment Laudato Si.
Sister Margarets work with worldwide governmental representatives on environmental issues will give a broad dimension to the crisis the Pope addresses in his encyclical.
Sister Margaret has also worked on other issues at the UN, including womens rights. Here is a piece that she wrote in February of this year.
If you plan to attend the talk, please RSVP to: contact@deiabq.org or 505-243-0525 Free to D+E+I members; others $10 free-will offering is appreciated.
To better define and provide information on aquaculture and aquaponics, I have begun a new blog that will focus on the topic of Closed Loop Aqua Farms. Where land based aquaculture is integrated with aquaponics and other farming methods designed to make maximum use of resources and farming bi-products. The new blog is titled Closed Loop Aqua Farms. It can be found at this link
I will continue to post information here that is more specific to Aquaculture only particularly intensive land based farming using water recirculation systems. Of course recent and relative news will be blogged on both sites where appropriate.
This should help provide my readers with more more information that is better presented.
The new blog will focus more on the topic of aquaponics and poly-culture farm scenarios.
Closed Loop Aqua Farming Blog
The Image below is an illustration of the Closed Loop process that I will be blogging on.
Thanks for visiting. I hope you enjoy reading my stuff. If you do tell a friend about it!
A few weeks ago, we were reading a 5 Acres and a Dream blog post about making homemade leavening from wood ashes (i.e., from potassium carbonate, K2CO3), and a reader in the comments section asked if calcium carbonate (CaCO3) from eggshells, which also reacts with acid to release CO2 gas (reaction below), could be used as a leavening agent. We had been wondering the same thing for quite a while, and the realization that other folks were wondering the same thing provided the motivation we needed to finally get up and do some experiments.
Calcium carbonate (CaCO3) reacts with acetic acid in vinegar to make calcium acetate, carbon dioxide gas (CO2), and water (H2O).
First, some eggshell chemistry. Eggshells are about 95% CaCO3, but the CaCO3 is bound in a matrix of protein, with a proteinaceous membrane also attached. Thus, one might expect that eggshells would make a better leavening agent if the CaCO3 could be isolated from the protein (and/or ground very finely) so that it would be more accessible to the acid during baking. The question is, how to get rid of the protein? Well have to either dissolve the protein away from the CaCO3 or dissolve the CaCO3 away from the protein and then regenerate it somehow. Today well try the former.
Theres quite a bit of precedent for dissolving away the eggshell protein (or at least, most of it) with a strong base, such as sodium hydroxide (NaOH) or potassium hydroxide (KOH), but specific recipes are hard to come by. Several articles refer to this original gem, the most useful being this one, which allows us to deduce that those guys boiled their eggshells in a 2.5 wt% NaOH solution for 5 minutes, which easily removed the membrane and part of the protein matrix. They then increased the lye concentration to 10 wt% and boiled for a long time, finding that all the protein that could be removed was gone by about 7 hours. They didnt give a lye-to-eggshell ratio, though. Additionally, this patent references another patent (we couldnt track down the original) claiming that boiling eggshells in 3 wt% NaOH would reduce the protein content of the shells to < 0.1%, although the boiling time and lye-to-eggshell ratio wasnt specified.
A protein content of < 0.1 wt% sounds good enough to us, so we decided to follow that route most closely. Having to guess on the time and lye-to-eggshell ratio, we decided that if we had to boil for more than half an hour and use more than a 1:1 ratio, that it wouldnt be worth our trouble. (In that case, wed just use Leighs ash-based leavening instead!) Alright, experiment planned; lets do this!
Heres our recipe: 15 g NaOH, dissolved in 500 g tap water, with 15 g coarse-ground eggshells (1-2 mm particles) added. Boiled for 30 min. Wear safety glasses and gloves until everything is neutralized later on (see below).
As the mixture simmered, the lye water turned a cloudy yellow. A good sign that were dissolving protein.
After boiling, we poured the liquid through a coffee filter (supported by a polypropylene funnel) into a quart jar. The eggshells dont look that much different than before, except maybe slightly darker. The pigment (they were brown shells) is still there. The coffee filter is really slow, so something like an old t-shirt or terrycloth towel might be better.
The filtrate is still highly caustic, so be careful with it! We wanted to neutralize it before doing anything else, so we added a couple tablespoons of our good ol red cabbage pH indicator, causing the filtrate to go from yellow to slightly-darker-yellow. Note if youre following along at home--dumping the filtrate down the drain without neutralizing might kill some of your friendly septic system bugs, so please neutralize!
Then we added vinegar until it turned green, then blue, then finally purple, indicating a neutral pH. (We had to add a few more tablespoons of pH indicator as it got more and more dilute, because the color changes started to get hard to see.) Now it can go down the drain or into the compost.
The next step is to repeatedly rinse the boiled eggshells to wash all the lye off. These are the rinses (plus pH indicator), showing steadily decreasing alkalinity. After the fourth rinse (which was with vinegar), the filtrate is neutral, the eggshells should be substantially free of lye (and hopefully protein!), and were good to move on (and take off our safety glasses and gloves). We also neutralized the second and third filtrates with vinegar, too. Safety note: working with lye on something youre planning to eat has the potential to cause some serious damage if you dont neutralize properly. Be careful and only do this if youre comfortable with the chemistry! Also, make sure youre using pure lye, and not some cleaner that has lye combined with other chemicals.
Drying the lye-boiled eggshells makes them easier to work with. In the oven at 300 °F for 15-20 min ought to do the trick!
Time to make some experimental biscuits! Five sets of three biscuits each. Recipe per set: 0.5 cups all purpose flour, 0.25 teaspoon leavening, 0.125 (1/8) teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon butter (in the bowls), 1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar plus milk (2%) to bring the volume up to 0.25 cups to make a faux buttermilk (in the glasses). We processed the bowl contents in a food processor for about 5 seconds to cut in the butter, then added the "buttermilk" and processed for another 5 seconds to mix everything up, scooped the dough/batter into drop biscuits and baked at 400 °F for about 20 min. The five sets differ only in their leavening: no leavening, lye-boiled coarse-ground eggshells, coarse-ground eggshells, fine-ground eggshells, and baking soda.
After baking, there a clear difference between the No Leavening control and the rest, but also between the baking soda and the rest. Between the eggshell sets, the lye-boiled and the finely-ground are about equal, and slightly more risen than the coarse-ground. However, all the eggshell sets are very close to each other, and closer to the control than to the baking soda. Also, we didnt have enough room for all fifteen biscuits on this sheet, so we baked the third biscuit of the last three sets separately. Their appearance was consistent with the biscuits here. Hooray for reproducibility!
The textures are consistent with the appearance, but its hard to tell from the photos. Also, the biscuits other than the baking soda set werent cooked all the way through after 20 min. We put them back in the oven; after another 15 minutes they were no longer doughy, but they didnt rise any more. The flavor of all the sets is decent, so the control set and the eggshell sets would make decent dumplings if youre into that sort of thing. Overall, the conclusion from these experiments is that the eggshells provide some leavening effect, but not much. For us, the ground eggshells dont really get the job done, and its definitely not worth the effort of boiling them in lye water to dissolve off the protein.
But were not done with these experiments yet! Stay tuned for Part 2, where we dissolve and regenerate the calcium carbonate part, and see how that works as leavening!
Weve been looking for a way to move canning operations outside during the heat of the summer. Not only does it help keep the house cooler, theres just something especially liberating about processing food outside. Maybe its because theres so much more room than in our tiny kitchen. Maybe its because we use combustion heat directly, which is more efficient than, say burning coal to produce heat to boil water to generate electricity that generates heat on an electric stove. Or maybe it just feeds the soul of our inner caveman...
Anyway, until recently, we had no such capacity around The Lab to do outdoor canning. Then we cobbled together a couple projects to remedy the situation. On the docket for today: the Dakota Rocket Silo. Its a combination of one well-known homestead technology (the rocket stove), and a similar, but lesser-used technology (the Dakota fire hole). Essentially we built a Dakota fire hole and added a cinder block chimney to turn it into an underground rocket stove. But anything related to underground rockets has to be called a silo. Hence the full name.
Profile view of what the Dakota Rocket Silo (DRS) would look like if we sawed right down the middle of it and a couple feet deep into the yard.
Heres what it looks like in real life. The two pieces of angle iron hold the pot off the cinder blocks so the air can still flow well. Wait! No! Katie, thats not a biffee!! (EDIT: Katie says, "You can take that part out right now, buster!")
Before starting a fire, its a good idea to make sure the bricks are level--we dont want a pot full of hot jam becoming unbalanced and tipping over! Then wed have to lick off the grass.
...Fire in the hole!
How long does it take to boil a quart of water? When the DRS is still heating up (and making smoke), a little under 12 minutes. Once its good and hot, considerably less than that. Accompanying the fire is a wheelbarrow full of old fence wood and our mobile kitchen. All in all, not a bad way to start a Thursday. Ok, Jake. Time to go into work.
Later that night...
Hey, look! A successful batch of plum jam, cooked outside over a wood fire. It was so tasty, Katie let herself be persuaded to have a piece of toast, even though it was way past her bedtime. We didnt take any pictures during this batch, but we learned quite a bit. Well do a follow-up post on that soon, but for now, suffice it to say that cooking jam outside by flashlight, and then coming back into a nice cool house is one of the more awesome sensations weve had all summer.
Have you canned outdoors? What is your setup like? Let us know in the comments below!
The internet is full of free resources to use in order to make your life easier. There are many reasons to download models rather than creating one from scratch. To save time, save money or even for testing lighting. As long as you follow the users rules, it is perfectly acceptable to download these models. Below an a linkto 3D aquaponics system
Link 3D Models
D. Koster
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Aquaponics - Commercial aquaponics - Hydroponics - Grow bed
Share this article on Facebook to help me with blogging to use this link
Peace Lutheran Church was presented the Haaland Award for Advocacy at the Lutheran Advocacy Ministry-NM,... https://t.co/WRdRjIpf3a
— PeaceLutheranLC (@plc_lc) February 6, 2016
Picture (left to right): Rev. Ron Brooker (retired pastor, member of Peace Lutheran Church, and member of the Lutheran Advocacy Ministry-NM policy committee), the Rev. Jared Carson (pastor of Peace Lutheran Church), Ellen Young (writer, member of Peace, and an advocate active in LAM-NM and Bread for the World).
Display at Peace Lutheran
Judy Messal, chair of the Lutheran Advocacy Ministry-New Mexicos policy committee (standing at the far right in the picture), offered these remarks at the ceremony where members of Peace Lutheran Church were honored for their advocacy work. The award presentation was part of LAM-NMs annual bishops luncheon in Santa Fe on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016. (Peace Lutheran Church as been participating in Bread for the Worlds Offering of Letters.
(In 2016, members of the church wrote 87 letters to Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich and Rep. Steve Pearce urging for the Child Nutrition Act to be reauthorized).
It is my great pleasure to speak about Peace Lutheran Church of Las Cruces: this years recipient of the Chris and John Haaland Advocacy Award. The award was created to honor the Haalands, whose passion for justice was instrumental in establishing our Lutheran Advocacy Ministry here in New Mexico. Past recipients of the award have been the following: • Ivan Westergaard, supporter of Lutheran advocacy, leader in Albuquerque Interfaith • And Carlos Navarro, New Mexico Coordinator for Bread for the World.
Now, Peace Lutheran Church, we recognize the steadfast advocacy work you have done. Since the first year of Lutheran advocacy in New Mexico 1984, you have been involved—both your clergy and the people of your congregation have supported us.
Members of Peace had been leaders in our statewide ministry. Throughout our 32 years, there has always been a member of Peace on our Policy Committee.But you didn’t stop there. You have an active, even a model, Bread for the World ministry advocating just policies to alleviate hunger in the United States and abroad.
Your members also have been active advocates in your community on matters affecting homeless children, immigrants, and others.
I also want to mention the Border Service Corps, a program your congregation-- relatively small at the time--had the courage to establish in the 1990s. The program provides opportunities for young people of various faith backgrounds-- from the U.S. and even abroad--to serve people on the U.S./Mexico border. Living simply together, earning only small stipends, they work in daycare programs for homeless children, in health clinics and ACLU offices, in Catholic Charities legal services, in food pantries, in Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and more.
And finally, as advocates, they work toward systemic change.
In all these ways, Peace Lutheran Church, your faithful advocacy inspires us.
The Lutheran Advocacy Ministry-New Mexico invites you to its annual Advocacy Conference on Saturday, November 7, 9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., at St. Timothy Lutheran Church, 211 Jefferson NE (map). The cost is $15 per person, including lunch.
State Senator Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a member of the New Mexico Senate since 2005, will be the keynote speaker during lunch. He is currently Chair of the Senate Public Affairs Committee and Chair of the interim Legislative Health and Human Services Committee.
Breakout session topics include advocacy basics, hunger, predatory lending, solitary confinement and more.
Registration Information To register, send a check for $15 to Lutheran Advocacy Ministry-NM, 1701 Arroyo Chamiso, Santa Fe, NM, 87505. Include your name, address, phone number and email address.
Or you can email the information to info@lutheranadvocacynm.org or call 505-984-8005 and pay at the door. Please register by Nov. 3.
The internet is a tremendous place for connecting rabid information consumers with useful information products like German a capella, groundhog videos, and even homesteading information. We try to do a little of both rabidly consuming and usefully producing, but our brains are becoming full and we need a place to keep track of homesteading info we want to refer back to later on. Hence, a new monthly collection of links we love. Heres links we love that we found in January. Hope you like them as much as we did!
Eating dried scarlet runner beans Pear root stock compatibility High-density sugar maples for sap Super sweet sugar maples Best tree species for Shiitake logs Is it safe to use cinder blocks or red bricks in ovens? Dont forget to use the phrase riding bodkin Planning forest garden hedgerows
Furoshiki (clever ways to wrap stuff in a piece of cloth) Solar-powered grain mill How to age wood (for when you want to pay for new wood *and* the materials to make it look old...or if youre just interested in the chemistry thats going on) Keeping rosemary alive indoors How the Hencam works Blizzard time-lapse video How jaywalking became a crime Dried greens for winter nutrition
Every Friday, The Albuquerque Journals arts and entertainment section publishes two restaurant reviews: one in Albuquerque and another in Santa Fe. The reviews reflect the wide variety of cuisines available in the Duke City and in the City Different. Many of these restaurants along with a couple of food-service companies (32 in Albuquerque and 29 in Santa Fe) are giving back to the community by participating in the annual Souper Bowl event that helps raise funds for the Food Depot and Roadrunner Food Bank. Both events will take place on Saturday, January 30, a week before the National Football Leagues Super Bowl 50. Read about hunger in Northern New Mexico and around the state. Hunger is more than just statistics. Here are some people stories from Roadrunner Food Bank.
This post features the Roadrunner Food Bank fundraiser, which will take place at the food banks facility, 5840 Office Blvd NE (map), 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
How many of these restaurants below have you patronized? Raise your hands if you have dined at all 32 of these fine establishments? How about half of them? One quarter? Never mind. You have a chance to sample the fare of any or all of these restaurants on the last Saturday of January. Scroll down for more details....
Yes, its RoadRunner Food Banks 2016 Souper Bowl.The annual event helps raise funds for our local food bank, which covers a large area of central and southern New Mexico.
If youve been to the event before, you know the drill. Here is the information on how to get tickets. Bon Appetit!
“I would rather see health care in the grocery store than in the pharmacy.” -David Perry, program director, Zenger Farms, Portland, Oregon
“Food should be considered a treatment option for our patients,” -Lee Hammerling, MD, chief medical officer and chief physician executive, ProMedica, Toledo, Ohio
Food Prescription programs make it easier for low-income patients and their families to access the fresh fruits and vegetables they need in order to ensure that they are eating balanced, healthy diets. The programs generally begin with a partnership between a hospital and a local farmer’s market or CSA (community supported agriculture) to increase access for people who need access to nutritious food to improve their health.
"Although Food Prescription programs are relatively new, pilot programs have shown promising results in improving health outcomes in communities where they have been implemented," wrote Molly Miller in an article published by Stakeholder Health in 2014.
According to Miller, there is already some evidence that the food prescription programs are working. She notes that the The Fresh Prescription Program, which seeks to build partnerships between the local food system, the healthcare system, and low-income patients in the Detroit area, has shown some signs of promise. See above video about the Community Health and Social Services (CHASS) Center.
Roadrunner Food Bank Opens Healthy Foods Center
Produce at Railyard Market
In Albuquerque, Roadrunner Food Bank has launched a food prescription pilot program in partnership with five local clinics. The program has been in place for several months but was only announced to the general public on Feb. 11 at the grand opening of the Healthy Food Center, located at the food bank, 5840 Office NE. Read more in Albuquerque Journal.
The health partners participating in the program are three Community Dental Services clinics and two University of New Mexico Hospital clinics. Here is how it works: the five clinics do a sort of triage among their patients. "Patients are asked about their food situation. If they answer in a way that indicates they aren’t getting enough to eat or are skipping meals, the health care partner issues a ‘prescription’ to come here,” said Alissa Barnes, Roadrunner Food Bank’s director of community initiatives.
The prescription provides for one weekly trip to the Healthy Foods Center for a year, where the clients can “choose the products that are right for their home,” Barnes said. The caveat: only clients with these referrals can get food from the on-site pantry.
As the name of the program implies, the focus of the program is entirely on health. “We have a lot of patients with Type II Diabetes, so we don’t offer them anything with added sugar. For those with hypertension, we offer them the low-sodium vegetables. For those with vitamin D deficiencies, we offer more whole grains, tuna fish, and milk so they can get that extra Vitamin D," said Angela Smith, a diet technician with Promedica, a health care provider in Toledo, Ohio. Read more about Promedicas Food Pharmacy.
Working Together Promedica has partnered with the Alliance to End Hunger and several local health care providers around the country to examine the connections between health and hunger. The two organizations held a conference on this topic in partnership with Presbyterian Community Health in June, 2015. One of the keynote speakers was Ambassador Tony Hall, director emeritus of the Alliance to End Hunger. Other cities have hosted similar conferences, including Columbus, Ohio last fall.
The partnerships between health care providers and CSAs has worked well in other parts of the country. In Portland, Zenger Farm partnered with Multnomah County Health Department and the National College of Natural Medicine in a program that was started in 2014.
According to Barnes, Roadrunner Food Banks pilot program in Albuquerque will continue to the end of the year, and then “other health care clinics will be slowly rolled in.” The Healthy Foods Center will eventually incorporate other services, including immunizations, tax preparation, nutrition education and health screenings, she said.
Presbyterian Community Health, which recently recently launched a program offering a free healthy meal to children and youth seven days a week, is likely to join the food prescription effort in a more direct way soon. The program has already created a strong partnership with La Cosecha CSA. (See more in this video).
While our capers with shook swarming and wax rendering have been great, one other main benefit in pressing the reset button on our bees is the edible part. We humans arent going to catch the foulbrood, so if the bees cant eat their honey, we might as well! We just need to extract it. Fortunately, this post will be a lot shorter than the others. Heck, we can even throw in the sterilization of the hive bodies for good measure, and wrap this story up!
As a reminder, heres the overall process were working with.
We did the honey by a whatchagot version of the crush and strain method, since we were working mainly with brood frames, which meant honey around the outside, brood in the middle. That is, we didnt want to extract whole frames, just select chunks of comb. Our setup is two buckets; the top one has holes in the bottom. A t-shirt goes between the buckets to strain out chunks of comb, etc., and the comb gets mashed with our hands and goes in the top bucket. In this particular case, the bottom bucket also had holes, so the whole setup is in a cookie sheet for secondary containment.
Once the comb is crushed up, the honey will eventually drain out. It took several days, but its a low-tech, low-effort system! Of course, some honey will end up stuck to the comb (probably more than if we had a centrifugal extractor). We washed the comb through with water, to recover any residual honey for making mead. Some of the YouTube videos we saw in the research phase of this post showed people washing their wax before extracting it and just throwing out the water--so this is similar, but we keep the water for something tasty!
The water wont be concentrated enough to make a very strong mead as-is, so we added sugar to boost the final alcohol content (hence the name quasi-mead, since this stuff isnt made purely from honey). Also, the wine yeast need more nutrients than just the (diluted) honey and the sugar can provide, and the mead will need some tannins to keep it from tasting like vodka or cough syrup (depending on how much residual sugar there is), so we added some very strong rose petal-and-raisin-tea. We might forego the rose petals next time, since they didnt seem to be a very good source of tannins. Hopefully well have a post soon on our approach to making fermented beverages.
Our final yield was about 4.5 quarts of honey, or about 14 lbs. (There is a quart jar-and-a-half missing from this photo because Katie is part pooh bear.) Note that if you are extracting uncapped honey (as you may be doing during a bee reset), check the refractive index of it to make sure it has a low enough moisture content that it wont ferment in the jar. Below 20% is normally the standard, but other sources say 17-18% is a better target. Those other sources also say that if its a little higher moisture content than that, keeping it below 50 °F can also prevent spoilage.
Finally, sterilizing the boxes. Some say to heat everything, especially the corners and other nooks and crannies, until the wood is a uniform deep coffee brown color. The bacteria that causes EFB (Melissococcus plutonius, although it was originally called Bacillus pluton) is inactivated above 65 °C, which isnt enough to turn the wood brown. But heating until the wood is a little charred is an easy visual to make sure were in the safe zone for killing EFB (and any other diseases that might be hanging around). Sort of like roasting a giant wooden square marshmallow, but from the inside (the paint on the outside doesnt need to change color). By far, the easiest and fastest way to do this would be with a propane blow torch. But if you dont like the thought of all those difficult-to-recyclable propane canisters, you can get a similar effect with a little alcohol-fired camp stove. Definitely not the OSHA-recommended protocol, but it works!
Once all the parts the bees have touched are uniformly charred (minus the extra-resinous parts, which saw the same heat, but didnt turn color), we should be good to re-use the box.
How do you extract your honey and sterilize your hive boxes?
Most of us aquapons know that the health of all the creatures in our systems (fish, plants, worms, and bacteria) depends on proper pH. We also know that we are targeting pH in the 6.8 to 7.0 range but that we don’t have to worry about adjusting it until it goes down to 6.4 or up to 7.8. We also know that the best way to lower pH is with an acid, and that the best way to raise it is with carbonates or hydroxides. We know that rapid changes in pH can be very stressful to fish. And we know that the pH will probably decrease over time because the nitrogen cycle produces an acid (nitric). But often, knowing all of this and applying it to our systems are two different things. At The Aquaponic Source, we handle questions and concerns each and every day about pH. Generally, the questions fall into one of two categories:
- The water out of my tap is a pH of 8 (or more) and I can’t seem to lower it reliably. What should I do?
- The pH in my system is dropping constantly and I have to add something to raise it almost daily. Is this normal?
Most pH mysteries in aquaponic systems boil down to how ‘hard’ the water is that we put into our systems. This ‘hardness’ dictates the buffering capacity of water… Let me explain. Water from most sources has some level of mineral salts dissolved in it (purified water such as distilled or RO [reverse osmosis] filtered are clear exceptions). Among these dissolved salts are certain specific minerals that strongly affect your water pH. The concentration of these minerals in your water is often described by the term ‘hardness’, the higher the concentration of these minerals, the ‘harder’ your water is. There are two types of hardness in water: ‘carbonate hardness’, (KH), which is sometimes also referred to as the water’s ‘buffering capacity’ or ‘alkalinity’ (not to be confused with an ‘alkaline’ solution which would have a pH greater than 7) and ‘general hardness’ (GH) which refers to the concentration of calcium and magnesium ions in the water. The general hardness of the water affects pH but it is the buffering capacity (KH) of your water that is the more critical pH factor. This buffering capacity acts like an invisible sponge that soaks up whatever acid or base is in your system, or that you add to your system, until the buffer is ‘used up’. With this sponge-like behavior in mind, imagine trying to adjust your pH. Let’s say you have a pH of 8.0 in your aquaponics system and you would like to bring it down to 7.0. You start adding our AquaDown pH Lowering Agent, and adding, and adding, and little or nothing changes. And then all of a sudden the pH plummets. What has happened? You had a strong buffer (meaning there was a lot of KH) in your system which you eventually ‘overwhelmed’. Another way of thinking about this is that you ‘filled up’ the sponge. You can actually measure your KH level and doing so may help you manage your pH. The larger the KH number, the more resistant your system will be to attempts to alter pH. Having a higher KH level can be beneficial in a fully cycled system because the nitrification process produces nitric acid which will persistently drive pH down in an unbuffered environment. A rule of thumb is that a KH of less than 4.5 dH (degree hardness) means that you don’t have much buffering capacity and you should be checking your pH a few times a week. How do you increase your system’s buffering capacity? When you are fully cycled and your pH drops below 6.8, add calcium and potassium carbonate (the ingredients in our AquaUp pH Raising Kit) on a regular basis once you have fully cycled and start seeing your pH decrease below 6.8. You will find that over time, you will build an excellent buffer and your system should become more and more pH stable.
"Let us pray together for wisdom and conversion of hearts and actions to justice and hope on the eve of the first ever Papal Address to the U.S. Congress.
People will be praying all over the United States.:
We are so pleased to be praying together throughout New Mexico in these communities. Please download the flyer for your area for details:
Wed., Sept. 23, 6:30-7:30 pm, Old Town Plaza, Albuquerque--Flyer
Sept. 23, 7:30 pm, Gough Park Picnic Shelter, Silver City--Flyer
Sept. 23, 7-8 pm, Eddy County Court House, Carlsbad--
Thursday, Sept. 24, noon, Steps of St. Francis Cathedral, Santa Fe, info. mleagle@sjc.edu
A time to pray together for wisdom for ourselves and all leaders as we commit to action in light of the critical challenge of climate justice. September 23 is Yom Kippur for our Jewish brothers and sisters and Eid al-Adha (end of Hajj) with the Islamic community. We respect that they will be praying within their own traditions. As we pray for conversion and hope, we will be mindful of all of our interfaith brothers and sisters around the world affected by climate change, economic injustice and environmental degradation. Each site will have a call for actions as well.
Co-sponsored by New Mexico Interfaith Power and Light, New Mexico Conference of Churches, Catholic Charities, New Mexico Conference of Catholic Bishops, Interfaith Worker Justice of New Mexico, New Mexico Interfaith Dialogue and the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe.
National coordination by Interfaith Power and Light, Franciscan Action Network and Global Catholic Climate Movement.
If you have not organized a vigil with accompanying call to action around the Popes visit and would like information, contact joan@nm-ipl.org. It is not too late to have a small gathering in your home or faith community.
In todays text, (Luke 4: 14-30) I hear Jesus telling the people whom he is physically with (God with us) that God is also present with our neighbor. I sense an invitation to consider that Gods abundance necessarily means that there is room for someone else, other than us, to also be blessed by God. Our willingness to accept the breadth of Gods abundance means that we can dispel our notions of scarcity that keep our fists clenched.-Rev. Ruth T. West, San Francisco Theological Seminary (from Advent Reflection, Blessings Just for Us?)
Vote to End Hunger (VTEH), a broad coalition of individuals and organizations all committed to ending hunger in the U.S. and around the world by 2030, officially launched its campaign on Tuesday, October 13. "We believe that it will take the combined public and political will to do this by 2030 and are working together to elevate the issue of hunger with candidates during the 2016 election cycle," said the coalition.
The goal to end hunger by 2030 is compatible with Target 1 (No Poverty) and Target 2 (Zero Hunger) of the Global Goals for Sustainable Development, a commitment that world leaders made through the U.N. earlier this month.
Here are more specifics for VTEH . Goal Use the 2016 election process to make hunger, poverty and opportunity a higher political priority, so that the next President and Congress take action that will put our nation and the world on track to end hunger by 2030.
Vision End hunger in the United States and around the world by 2030.
Principles
Ending hunger in the United States and worldwide by 2030 is possible;
Ending hunger requires strong commitment and leadership from the U.S. government;
Ending hunger means fulfilling the right to food by ensuring all people at all times are able to access enough food for an active, healthy life;
Ending hunger is the shared responsibility of individuals, communities, the private sector, non-profits, faith-based organizations, and government;
Ending hunger is not a partisan issue;
Ending hunger requires both a strong safety net and policies that expand opportunity and reduce poverty;
The 2016 election provides an exceptional opportunity to make ending hunger, poverty and opportunity a higher political priority;
Therefore, we plan to work together to engage voters and candidates around the goal of ending hunger by 2030.
Get Involved Individuals: Sign the Pledge and Keep Informed (scroll down to bottom of page to sign up for newsletter) Organizations: Join the Coalition
Steering Committee The Alliance to End Hunger Bread for the World Feeding America Meals on Wheels America No Kid Hungry-Share Our Strength RESULTS
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