Unexpected growth

It has been almost a week after we are away from home and also a week after the hand pollination procedure. When I came back from holiday I discovered that both of the female flower has turned into a cucumber.  Will let you judge the rest on the miracle of aquaponic.

Pre Raya update

Finally I got some time to really look at what is going on with my aquaponic. Here are some of the update. This time the picture is a bit better because I just got a new toy for raya ;)

First of all, I spotted few female cucumber flowers so immediately I perform hand pollination to them to make sure that it turn into cucumber. It gets very exciting when you know that you might get few more additional cucumber in your crop.

Remember last time I mentioned that for cucumber to thrive it is best to have bees around? You can sort of simulate the pollination through few techniques. Here is how it can be done.


I used the brush technique because my hand is to big and I'm too rough with the flowers. Every time I peel of the petal everything will go apart.

Beside cucumber there are few other things been going on in my small aquaponic grow bed. The Spring onion has flower and hopefully I can harvest it's seed later.

Got bunch of little bayam merah and hopefully plenty of them will survive.

Pumpkin keep flowering but the bad news is all of them are male flowers.

Not sure what happened to my kangkung but most of their leaves have these markings. Anyone know why?

Finally the star of the month!

the cucumber has grown but not yet fully grown. Refer to my last post to see the difference. It is huge now. hopefully it is yummy too. 

P/S: Just got my Adruino set and hopefully I can start with something this holiday.

Automation for aquaponic

Lately I got my head on Adruino (opensource electronic prototyping) and I was intrigue to incorporate it as part of my aquaponic. I have ordered my first adruino starter kit from Myduino and can't wait to get my hand dirty on it. My first plan is to develop a monitoring system to study the temperature and moist level of my aquaponic. Later may want to include the auto pump capability to feed the growbed with water on demand (this is to replace the current timer). People has allow their aquaponic to "talk" to them using Adruino and this helped your aquaponic to be efficiently working in it's equilibrium environment. Hopefully lead to much fruitful produce. Here are some example how Adruino is been incorporated into their Aquaponic.


I personally think that automation is essential in today's farming.