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When the insects and the flowers arrive

Posted on by Posted in Help, Pests, Plants/Garden Leave a comment

Once your vegetables have grown, they will start to set flowers and then fruits. And during their growth, they might get attacked by insects.
I’m pretty sure you guys would like for these insects to stay away and for all the flowers to turn into fruits. What would you have to do to make this happen?

In my previous post I wrote about how to make your seedlings grow faster than normal.
The healthiest seedlings will have less chance of getting attacked by unwanted insects. There are many things you can do to get rid of these insects. Such as pesticides or a garden insectary.
In this post I’ll teach you how to get rid of these insects by using other insects we call Beneficial Insects.

These beneficial insects will get rid of the bad ones. This is an organic way of getting rid of them. You won’t be needing any pesticides to get rid of them. Using these pesticides can also damage our environment.
Now how can you attract these beneficial insects? Flowers are a great way to attract these beneficial insects. This is when the garden insectary comes in.
A garden insectary is a garden filled with flowers in the area of your plants to attract beneficial insects to your plants. It doesn’t have to be big one. Just a few flowers can be enough. But the best is to use different kind of flowers. Since not all these beneficial insects are attracted to the same type of flower.

Bees. Garden insectary can also attract bees. Some plants’ flowers such as tomatoes need to be pollinated to be able to set fruits. A way to pollinate these flowers is with the help of bees. And once you have them, you can get beautiful tomatoes.

When the tomato plant sets flowers, you won’t have to have bees around to get them pollinated. You can “shake” the plant a little once a day to get them pollinated.
The good thing is that not all plants’ flowers need to be pollinated. So it is less work for you.

So from now on, check your plants at least once a week for signs of pests. When you see them, take immediate action. They can slowly kill your plants.

How to make your seedlings grow faster, healthier and stronger

Posted on by Posted in Compost, Nutrients, Plants/Garden Leave a comment

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Everybody would like for their vegetable plants to grow fast, strong and healthy. There are a lot of things they say you can do. But not all of them really help.
I do know two things that you can do that will definitely make them grow strong and healthy. And one of them, would also make them grow faster.

In my previous post, I wrote on how to make you seeds germinate faster. Once those have germinated, you would like for them to grow into beautiful vegetable plants that can produce a lot.

One of those things is watering your plants with fish water. Most of you guys may have an aquarium at home. This water contains many nutrients for your plants. I haven’t done this a lot myself, but I know some readers that did try it and have great success with it.

Dave Davis (@Davo_ov_scunny) tweeted:
@HydroGardening my friend uses hus fish tank water when he changes the water,full of fish poo & pee. Hydro-Ordanic. :-)

So I can assure you, that watering them with fish water makes them strong and healthy!

The other thing that you can do, is use worm tea. Worm compost is one of the best nutrients that you can give your plants. Worm tea is worm compost diluted in water. So in the worm tea, you get the same nutrients as in the worm compost.
Worm tea is my favorite nutrient to use. It’s organic and very effective. I’ve been using this for a long time on all my vegetable plants. And I can really see the difference.
I use it for nutrients, pesticide (which also helps a lot) and for rooting plants. I’m going to do an experiment on this so you can see the difference between plants watered with worm tea, plants watered with fish water and the one watered with normal water.

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If you want to see the results, then you don’t want to miss this. To make sure you don’t miss it, why don’t you subscribe to my newsletter?

How to make your seeds germinate faster

Posted on by Posted in Seeds Leave a comment

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Seeds can take many days or even weeks before they germinate. Some faster than others. But you can make them germinate faster yourself. There are a lot of things you can do to make your seeds germinate faster. In this post I will be showing you three (3) of them.

Dark places
One way to get your seeds germinating faster is by putting them in a dark place after you have planted them. They will germinate much faster than when you have them outside in the sun.

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Some people also cover them with newspapers. This is also a great idea. Since when they are covered by the newspaper, the soil will stay moist. Becuase the newspaper is protecting it from drying out too fast. And moist soil is what your seeds love.

Soaking the seeds
To start germinating, seeds need a lot of water inside them. Soaking them will let them absorb the quantity of water that they would have absorbed in maybe a week. So it is good to soak your seeds for about 24 hours before planting them.
When you soak them, the seeds will absorb the water. This triggers the seed into thinking that it has been planted for several days already. Which let the seeds start germinating. Since they already absorbed the water that they would have absorbed in more than a day, they will germinate faster when you plant them.

How to soak your seeds
Put the seeds in water for about 24 hours. Not a lot of water.
You will notice when the seeds absorbed enough water. Because their colors will get lighter than they were before.
After you have soaked them, you can now plant them.

Vermicompost
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For those of you that don’t know, vermicomposting is a way of composting where you use worms to decompose your food waste for you. They do this very fast and what they produce is a very very nutrient rich soil for your vegetable plants.

Since the finished compost contains so much nutrients, using this when planting the seeds will make them germinate faster for sure!

1. When you’re going to plant them, fill the planting pot till where you want to plant the seeds.

2. Then add some finished worm compost in top of it.

3. Put your seed on top of the compost.

4. After that you can cover it with either potting soil or more compost.

This method is my favorite one to use. It works really great! A plant that would have germinated in 7 days, germinated in like 3 days. And some of them even started coming out the next day! How great is that?

So now it’s your turn. Choose one of these methods and try it out. Let me know how it worked out.
And if you have any questions, please ask them in a comment.
Feel free, don’t be scared.

Photo Contest

Posted on by Posted in Plants/Garden Leave a comment

photo contestFor this March I will be holding a Photo Contest.

What this Photo Contest is about

Take a photo of you in your garden and upload it on Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Instagram.
You will have to get as much likes, retweets or repins on your picture as possible. The photo with the most likes or retweets or repins will be the winner. So when you upload the photo, you have to share it to get more people to like or retweet or repin.

Why this contest?

I’m doing this contest to get more people interested in gardening.
Growing your own food is good because this way you know what you’re eating. You will also save more money by growing your own vegetables. When you buy them in stores, you don’t know how they have been grown. But there are many more reasons why you should grow your own food.

How to participate

Take a photo of you in your garden or while you’re gardening and post it one either Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Pinterest. You can only choose one of them.

  • If you choose to post on Facebook, you will have to post this on our wall (facebook.com/hypocu)
  • If you choose to post on either Twitter or Instagram or Pinterest, you will have to add the #HydroponicsCuracao & my blog’s link in the photo description.
  • Once a week I will look up for the photos and put them all in a gallery on this blog.

Who will be the winner?

After you upload your photo, you have to try to get as many likes or retweets or repins as possible. You can ask anybody to like or retweet or repin your photo. So you can only choose one of these social media to upload your photo on. If you upload it on more than one social media, you will be disqualified from the contest.

On the last day, I will look for the photo with the most repin or retweet or likes. The one that has the most of one of these, will be the winner. So try to get as many people as you can!

What will you win?

Since gardening can be time consuming, growing in hydroponics systems will save you a lot of time with watering and caring for your vegetables. Also growing in hydroponics uses less space than normal. So you will be able to grow more vegetables in less space. That’s why I’m giving the winner two hydroponics books with all the information and instructions you need to start your own hydroponic garden.

The contest will start on March 1st and will end on March 31st. All the likes or repins or retweets after March 31st, won’t count. 

Now please share this post with your friends and family so they can participate too!

How to make a simple raft system

Posted on by Posted in Help, Plants/Garden Leave a comment

In this post I will be teaching you guys how to make a simple hydroponic raft system.

Hydroponics is an easy way to grow your own food. It can be made very small and put anywhere you want. It reduces work and you don’t have to water your plants. It happens automatically. So that means that you save more time with watering plants and you save more water because you keep using the same water over and over.
In a hydroponic system you can plant more plants than in the same space in soil.
The plants grow faster than normal and the chance for them to get diseases is less than when they are in soil.

A raft system is a system where the plants grow in a medium and their roots hang in the water. This system is an easy system and is perfect for when you don’t have a lot of space. It is commonly used in very large commercial gardens.

Here are the steps:

  1. All you need is
    -a knife or drill
    -a plastic bin (size doesn’t matter)
    -some plastic cups
    -a marker
    -a ruler
    -and an oxygen pump.
  2. What you do next is you measure the cup’s diameter.
    Then you drill holes of a little bit smaller so the cups won’t fall in the bin. If you don’t have a drill, you can use a knife. For example: I used a cup with a diameter of 7 cm. So I made 6×6 cm squares.
    If you heat up the knife, you can make the squares much easier than normal.
  3. After that, you start making holes in the cups.
    This is needed for the water to get to the roots. You can make the holes with a knife, scissors or a heated nail.
    The more holes you make the better. 
  4. Your next step is to fill the cups with your growing media.
    You put them into their holes and fill them with the medium. The best medium is hydroton. This is because it keeps the water at the perfect temperature and also the pH at the perfect level. But at most stores, hydroton is expensive. So you can also use gravel or crushed coconut. But there are a lot of other things you can use.
  5. Then you are ready to plant your plants in the system! 
    I’ve planted 3 peppers, 1 celery and 1 tomato. But you can plant anything you want in this system.

You put the airstone of the oxygen pump into the bin with water. Otherwise your plants/fishes will die.

This system can also be used as an aquaponic system.
All you need extra is fish and fish food.

Aquaponics has almost the same advantages as hydroponics.

  • It reduces work that has to be done in a garden
  • helps you to save more water
  • and it requires less space.

And in an aquaponics system you can grow fish while you’re growing vegetables at the same time!

They say that the plants’ roots shouldn’t be in the same water as the fish. But I don’t think that it matters. I have a few pepper growing in a raft system and look at them, they’re growing great!


Extra tips:
  • If you have another bin, you can fill it up with water and put it in the sun to create algae. This can be feed to the fish.
  • If you have a transparent bin, you should paint it white. Otherwise algae will start growing into the bin. And algae take the oxygen out of the water.

Tips to decompose waste faster

Posted on by Posted in Compost Leave a comment
aquaponics systems
Worm compost

This is my worm compost. Most of what you see is worm castings ready to be harvested

Compost is a way of making nutrient rich soil for your plants. It can be done with or without worms. The fruits and vegetables will get decomposed and will become a soil-looking material.

The fastest way to do this, is with help of compost worms.

These worms eat vegetables, fruits, manure and other organic materials. Their poop, which is called casting, will contain a lot of nutrients that your plants will love.

To make the process of decomposing go faster, I recommend you to pre-rot the worm food before feeding the worms.
When you have your food scraps, put them in a bin, close the lid and put this in the sun. Once a day you turn the food scraps in the bin for aeration.
After about 3 days the food scraps will be looking very soft and it will be smelling very bad.

When you have done this, you can add this to the compost. Put it between the bedding and cover it with new bedding.

Since you have already started breaking down the food for the worms by pre-rotting it, they will eat it much faster. Which will speed up the process and you will be able to get finished compost faster.

Related Posts

Preparing a worm bin

Using vermicompost, castings and worms in your garden

 

How Do You Harvest Worms

What and what not to feed your worms and how to feed your worms

Different worm species

Bedding for worms

Tips For Growing Tilapia

Posted on by Posted in Aquaponics, Help Leave a comment

Tilapia is a fresh water fish. They grow very fast and they are often used in aquaponics systems.
Tilapia is pretty easy to grow. This post will teach you how to grow them.

Species
Start by deciding what species you want to grow. The most common are Blue tilapia and Nile tilapia.
The Blue tilapia grows pretty slow but it is the most cold tolerant species of tilapia.
The Nile tilapia grows much faster but only in tropical conditions.

Stock
Then decide how many tilapias you want to grow. You should put 5 to 6 fingerlings per square meter of water surface area.
If you already have adult tilapia and want to breed them, then you should put 1 male for every 3 females.

Temperature
The recommended temperature for tilapia is between 28 and 30 degrees C.
The growth rate will decrease if the water temperature is below 20 degrees C.

Food
Algae is their most common food in the wild. But tilapia also eat pellets and dog food.

Top 5 vegetables to grow in small spaces

Posted on by Posted in Plants/Garden 1 Comment

Growing vegetables is fun! I have grown a lot of different vegetables throughout the years. But I have made my top 5 of the vegetables I think are the best for small space gardens and here it is.

1. Pepper
Pepper is the plant I have had the most success with. I have grown a lot of them and harvested a lot from them too. They don’t require a lot of space even though they end up giving you so much peppers. I just recently wrote a post on how to grow peppers with succes. If you want to try growing them, then take a look at the post.

2. Tomato
My second one on the list is Tomatoes. I haven’t had much success with them, I still can’t figure out why, but I have always loved to grow these vegetables. They do require a lot of care and can become a bit large. But still, they are just great vegetables to grow.

3. Lettuce
Lettuce is very easy to grow. They are one of those who germinate really fast and they also grow very fast. In just a few weeks you can start harvesting. Especially if you’re growing the black seeded simpsons. They can be planted in a very small pot and you can put it even in your kitchen. You don’t need a lot of space for them and still grow enough.

4. Scallions
Scallions, when they are still little, need very carefull care. This is because they are small and thin. But once they settle down and start growing, you won’t have to worry about this. In just a small pot you can grow lots of them.

5. Garlic
I just recently started growing these. I haven’t harvested any yet but I did learn more about growing garlic. They are pretty easy to grow. But they take long before you can harvest them. In one small pot you can grow about 3. Which is enough for a small family. The plan itself doesn’t become very big. So it won’t be a problem either.

Well, that was my top 5. Later on I will be posting how to grow each on of these vegetables. I hope you liked the post and feel free to leave a comment below.

Why aren’t my worms reproducing?

Posted on by Posted in Compost, Help Leave a comment

Worms are a gardeners best and most valueble friend. They eat your garbage and turn it into nutrient rich compost for your plants. As a worm grower, you would want them to increase in population very fast. But that doesn’t always happen..

A worm population tend to double every 90 days. Thats is very fast. But of course, you have to help this happen by taking good care of them. Worms don’t like a lot of movement. So I would recommend you to leave them alone most of the time. Don’t keep looking in the bedding for worms or cocoons. Also, when you do this, you disturb the process in the bin. You will stress out the worms. And might end up with the result that your worms won’t reproduce.

Provide your worms with enough food. Remember the list of what they eat and what they don’t. If you can, give your worms what they like the most eat. You can find out what the like more by writing down what they eat the most each time you give them food and what they don’t. If there’s abundance in food, worms will reproduce with no problem. But whatch out not to overfeed them. This can damage your compost.

As a worm grower you must know what type of composting worms you have. This is very important since each type of worm requires another type of temperature. If their temperature is not how they prefer, these worms won’t reproduce the way you want.

Something that is proven to increase worm reproduction is manure. Especially when there is horse manure, your worms will reproduce like crazy. I have been using rabbit manure. This has also increased the worm reproduction.

Well, have you been doing these in your worm bin? Then you’re on the good way. If not, you should change that now!

Have any question about this? Please feel free to ask in a comment below.
For deeper information about worm composting, visit Vermicomposters.com.

Growing Peppers with success

Posted on by Posted in Help, Plants/Garden, Seeds Leave a comment

Wether it’s Green or Hot peppers, we all need it in our kithen. Why go to the supermarket to buy them while you can grow them yourself?
Peppers are very easy to grow and you don’t need a lot of time to do this. If you grow them right, you will have much success with them! To find out how, you should keep reading.

Here are some peppers in my garden

 

Peppers are one of my favorite vegetables to grow. This is because they grow really fast and once they start producing vegetables, they don’t stop! I have had the most success with Hot peppers. I had Habanero Peppers (you can see them in the upper right corner). They have given me so much peppers! More than I could even use. So I had to stop their production by taking out the plants and plant new ones. And now I started growing them again. Read on to know how!

 

What to do

Start out by preparing the soil. I recommend you to use potting soil. If you want, you can add extra nutrients to the soil. I do this by mixing worm compost in the soil. These castings contains a lot of nutrients and your vegetables will love it! Mix the nutrients well in the soil and keep tilling the soil to make it loose.My Green Pepper is growing pretty fast.

After you have your soil ready, you can start planting the seeds. Don’t plant them too close together. Leave about 10 to 20 cm space between each plant. The roots normally don’t require much space. But once the plants start to grow, they will have a lot of branches. And those are what takes the most space.

The seeds take about 7 to 14 days to germinate. But I’m going to tell you something that you can do to let them germinate faster. You can only do this if you have worm compost or if you can get access to some vermicompost. What I do is, I start my seeds in an egg carton. Below the seed (where it will be laying on the soil), I sprinkle a little bit of vermicompost. Then I put the seeds on top of that and cover them with more soil. I put this egg carton in a “saucer” with water to keep the soil wet. Last time I did this, they germinated in about 4 days! So try it out if you can and let me know how it worked out.

Once I have the pepper seedlings, I transplant them to the bin. And let them grow. Since Curacao is a Tropical Island, we don’t have winter or summer or spring here. It is the same temperature all year long. But between October and March is our so called “rainy months” where it rains more than the other months in the year. So in that period, I don’t have to water my vegetables a lot. Sometimes only once a week or sometimes once in 2 weeks or I don’t even have to water them at all for an entire month!
To save time with watering, you can create a very cheap drip system. I do this when it doesn’t rain a lot anymore.
How to do this?

  1. Get a 1 liter or a 2 liter bottle and cut off the bottom.
  2. In the cap you drill a hole. Doesn’t have to be very big.
  3. Dig a hole in the soil where the vegetables are.
  4. Put the bottle (with the cap on) upside down in that hole. The hole should be big enough to hold the bottle up.
  5. Then you fill the bottle with water (from where you cut off the bottom) and you’re done!

The soil will slowly get moist from the water that drips out of the cap of the bottle. If the bottle is too loose, the water will get out really fast.
The first time, the water runs out on the same day. Since the soil might be dry. But once it is moist enough, the water won’t run out that fast anymore.
I recommend you planting the vegetables in rows and put one bottle in the middle of the rows. For each set of 4 plants = one bottle. Too bad I don’t have a picture of this right now.

 

Look at my peppers growing!

In just a few weeks or months your peppers will start to set flowers. If the plant is healthy, then most of these flowers will turn into a pepper. My green pepper plant isn’t that healthy. Till now, only 2 flowers have turned into peppers. There are still more flowers coming and I hope they will become peppers too.

If you need a lot of hot peppers in a short time, grow Habanero Peppers! About 80% of all the flowers turn into peppers. And they will be ripe really fast.

 

After you’ve harvested the peppers, put them in a plastic bin and store them in the refrigerator. This way they won’t rotten as fast as normal.

 

I hope you guys like this post and I hope you learned a lot. Now that you know how to grow them, why not start now?
Feel free to ask any question you have in a comment below. I will be more than happy to help you out.

 

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