www.sausagemaking.org

Grab a 1 metre PVC tube equally mark out 12 slots 4 cms long,put a end on.My one is a sieve end, to stop mosquitoes getting in your water tank(shade cloth or fly wire will do)
cut with a hacksaw,then using a blow torch or heat gun melt the pipe above the cut and push it in.
String it up add a hook and a swivel(fishing)
Clean the dirt of the roots of 12 strawberry plants
Place in pockets and pour perlite down the tube
I cut a PET bottle for top and bottom left the lid on and drilled a small hole in both,attached a bucket to catch the nutrients.
Start with half strength nutrient mix then after 2 weeks normal .
Said to produce 4 x more than in the ground plus no bird or dirt problems.











and tomatoes in semi hydro self watering pots will thin out I just planted the bigger Tommy Toes,the smaller ones are just millions of cherry tomatoes coming up wild from last years crop

crap view you got there snags!

Yeah, he only gets morning sun.

Could you tell us more about the nutrient mix?

I'm only new to this and its really experimental,but just using a soluble fertiliser you get readily around here.I imagine brands change in everywhere but the NKP is what matters.

http://www.yates.com.au/products/fertil ... lant-food/

Last year I drilled holes in the PVC and the water ran out the sides and had leaf fungus problems.The new pushed in slot technique seems the better option.



PS it is a view you can get sick of,hasn't happened yet though
Morning sun about 6.00 until about 1 pm
It is winter and about 25C (77F)
I will post if it gets covered in fruit and totally ignore and hope the thread disappears if its a complete failure

Update killed the strawbs had to start again

I upped the fertiliser and all the strwabs leaves wilted and died I tried extra water but it must of burnt the roots.

Second lot has been going for a month on 3/4 strength solution

Cherry tomatoes are delivering heaps of tomatoes

Thanks for the update. Your system is very appealing from a space standpoint and, I for one, would like to see it working. Even though tomatoes are a fruit, fresh strawberries are hard to beat. Did your weather have any role in the outcome?

We did get a cold snap(hit 16Celcius for 2 days which is unusual even for winter up here)
But normally about 20 Celsius so I don't think so.
They say strawbs don't like too much water and as I saw them droop their leaves I first thought they had dried out so I watered a little more.
So I think burnt roots became drowned roots.
New lot is going well so far still no flowers but have removed a few runners so that should hopefully trigger some soon.

No flowers yet,but alive and green is good



Plenty of tomatoes



and a pineapple

A pineapple - that's cool.

My macadamia is in full flower

I love Macadamia nuts - but they're very expensive over here.

Phil

I've heard that they are a very tough nut to crack, do you harvest them Snags? Here in North Carolina, there are a lot of hickory nut trees but no one I know bothers to harvest the nuts because the nut to effort ratio is so low. It takes a hammer to smash the shell. My old great aunt was the last person who could do it sucessfully and who gave the effort to do it. She would marvel at all the "free" food laying around and that people were going hungry.

$4AUD a kilo in the local petrol station in the shell
1 and a half hours down the road,Bundaberg is the biggest Macadamia growing area in the world.a lot of the old sugar cane farms where planted out about a decade ago.IT will be fantastic driving through this week when I go shopping ,the perfume from the flowers is excellent.
I have 2 trees one is grafted and the other is on its own root stock
Both are about 8 years old had maybe 10 nuts so far,but this years flowers are the biggest so far.They usually take about 8 years to produce.
I use a hammer to crack them or buy them shelled from the supermarket (about $20AUD a kilo )you can get them a few dollars cheaper from the farms.

That surprises me - they're not much cheaper peeled for you than they are here. I guess it's the labour costs involved.

phil

Aussie Dollar has gone mad
when I was living in England in 2003 it was $1 =33pence its now 69p