Having lost sleep over the last few weeks, what with being so excited at the concept of (almost) water-free gardening, I have finally come to the conclusion that aquaponics is not the way forward, to use management-speak terminology.

The thing is, as I see it, aquaponics is not so much a seamlessly integrated natural cycle of life using fish and plants to merge into one holistic food-system, as a method of fertilising plants using fish waste. Now, if we only had a tiny balcony and no room to grow stuff, and were keen fish-fanciers, I could see the point. However, we do have enough room to grow things, and we don’t really care about the fish, and more importantly, we have lots of other animals with an enthusiastic ability to defecate, so why keep fish (which are tricky), when we have stacks of other animals all producing nitrate waste by the bucket-load?

However, we are still very, very keen to find a way to reduce the water consumption, and we have found it. Wicking Beds. Here’s the plan: make a raised bed, a foot deep. However, under the raised bed, there is another foot of some medium that acts as a reservoir, and below that an impermeable membrane (or sheet of plastic), that stops the water heading off into the ground. So simple. So easy. So CHEAP! We may even get some fish to provide a lovely rich nitrate soup for fertilising the beds, but that will be later, and we can just as easily add chicken, sheep, cow etc. manure, via compost or just composting worms in the beds themselves (google wicking worm beds if you need more info).

So, this might be the end of the aquaponics heading, although I still have a hankering for a hydroponics style tank 20 metres long growing umpty-thousand head of lettuce all at once, so you never know. The good news is that the wicking beds will work with or without the fancy stuff, are just as thrifty with water, and hopefully will make a huge difference to our ability to grow stuff. Figures being bandied about suggest that we will need somewhere around 15,000 litres of water a year for the size of beds we are looking to make. Currently we use about 3,000 litres a DAY! Or to put it another way, we are hosing away a year’s worth of water every five days!

Of course, there are a few down-sides to this new system. Namely we will need to dig up just about every plant and flower we have and replant them all on top of plastic sheets. This could very well be a longer than long-term project. I feel for the strawberries, which are moved every six weeks, it feels like. Hopefully this will be the last time, and we can be all swanky and talk about “The Strawberry Bed”, as though we are somehow organised and professional. This will have to be followed by “The Raspberry Bed”, “The Red, Black and Blue Berry bed”, “The Bougainvillea Bed” and so on. Eventually, each olive tree could have its own private and personal bed to sleep in. I don’t think so.

Will have more info and photos as the huge infrastructure project gets started, maybe at the end of the week.