The tilapia have grown a couple of inches since our first fish harvest in December. Nothing beats going down to the basement and picking out a fish for dinner. From tank to table in 20 minutes. Depending on who’s (me) cleaning the fish, maybe 60 minutes.
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Our dinner guest holds up a large male (they grow faster than females).
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My mother is better at this, so she is given the honour of cleaning fish.
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“Eeeeeeeeew!” My daughter always threatens she’ll be vegetarian.
Scaled and gutted, ready to be steamed. There isn’t any fishy smell.
Last month, in celebration of Terra Madre Day, we sampled our first fish. Shown above, steamed in black bean sauce with ginger.
Same plate, second fish. See how much it grew in a month? Season with some salt and steam as is. You know the fish is done when the eyeball turns white.
Raw sliced green onion, ginger and a bit of soy sauce is added after the fish is steamed. A little bit of searing hot oil is poured overtop to bring out the flavours of the onion and ginger.
So clean, so fresh, so delicious. Watch out for bones.
So how did my garden grow since the last post? Here is the before…
Here’s the after, two months later.
The tomato plants have really grown, after cutting them back quite a bit, and harvesting a lot of the chard, I noticed the ammonia level in the water had gone up. Maybe there wasn’t enough leafy greens to take up all the converted plant food?
Swiss chard is doing extremely well, bok choy not bad considering they are grown too close together, and kale is not getting as big as they should. Some of the leaves shrivel up and die. There must be some sort of mineral deficiency.
What I do love is there are NO bugs. No white fly, no aphids, NO BUGS!
Mold had been a bit of a problem on some of the lower stems where I planted things too closely. Removing those stems and adding a clip-on fan to move the air seems to have remedied that.
We harvested all the bok choy today (half of the growbed area). It will be interesting to see if the ammonia level spikes again.
Trimmed and washed, ready for blanching.
Blanched in boiling water then chilled in cold water, the bok choy is ready for making wontons.
Get the recipe for Shanghai-style Wontons here.
marcia - love the garden! i will definitely try this in my basement next winter!
Janet - Fantastic Jill – what a bounty!!
kat - I love the parts of your blog where you appreciate animals for their intellect, capacity for love and the companionship they give. And the parts where you grow and harvest and prepare your own plant-based foods. I’m afraid to say I’m with your daughter here. Poor fishy.
Frank - I’m more than happy to come over for fresh fishy dinner!
Basement Aquaponics & Raising Tilapia » FreestyleFarm - [...] For an Update to this post, follow this link. [...]
benjamin - What amazing job they have done on the bok choy. Gonna have to try this dish at home. Very fresh and healthy bok choy. Wanna grow bok choy in an aquaponic system? More details below.
http://farmingeek.org/farming-how-to/how-to-start-aquaponic-farming/how-to-grow-bok-choy-on-aquaponic-farm