 It's our first spring in the new garden and the pond that we've inherited that has fish in it has gone very green and apparently this is something that happens at this time of year because there's not much in the way of big plant life to soak up the fish poo and so the algae just go completely mad and we've been running the filter for a couple of weeks and every morning I'm emptying out the filter and getting this kind of stuff out it's very thick and it's slowly making a difference to the pond but it's what we do with this that's most important and why I'm making this video because this is generally seen as a waste product but of course if you know anything about aquaponics then you'll realize that the process of aquaponics is all about using the waste of fish to feed plants and I've seen a few aquaponics systems that haven't been finished and they can be quite complex and involve lots of tanks and pipes and filters and so on and at some point when we first came here and I looked at the pond and I thought well that would be a good basis for an aquaponics system it already has fish and it's productive it has some water lilies in it at the moment and so on so at some point in the future maybe I'll get around to making aquaponics system at the moment we're planting we're establishing our soft fruit and our fruit trees and so on so at some point in the future but right now I'm doing manual aquaponics and so that might sound like a lot of work and it's when when we talk about permaculture sometimes people think permaculture is about not doing anything and that's not necessarily the case the main thing about permaculture is that the effort and the time that we put in is more than paid back by the benefits that we get so we do spend a lot of time observing trying to understand what's going on in a landscape in order to make the right decisions so that we can work with nature and essentially do things much more easily than if we don't think about them and but at the same time so there are things like zoning which is all to do with saving time and energy on a site and it was really designed for farms which are very intensively productive environments and rather than waste fuel by driving things backwards and forwards a lot when we could do them very simply by putting them in the right place zoning was designed in order to minimize that work but really in the garden on a smaller scale because all of my garden or our garden is zone one which is the immediate space around the house that we should be giving and do give a lot of attention to because we're here and we see it in that space is more important that I'm giving attention to the garden so if I automate this system and there's just something going on over there partly I'm limited in terms of the space that I can use to grow things that are being fed on these plants but also I don't give as much attention to the garden so when we're manually manual aquaponics effectively manually scooping out some filter water from the filter and then some of the pond water as well to dilute it and then water our plants what we're doing is we're giving attention to the pond but we're also giving our attention to the plants that we're growing because when we're doing this we're right up close and we're seeing things the problem with automation apart from the fact that there's an energy cost to that usually some kind of electricity is involved and that's fine if you've got solar or winds that can provide that energy for free I don't know that that's always the case in aquaponics systems but it's also it's also about the attention that we give to things because when we notice things then we can interact this one of David Hongren's principles is observe and interact and if you don't observe then how can you know what's going on and make a change make a tweak in the system we can care for plants in our system because we're able to notice things early on rather than just two weeks later go oh look this is things grown up perhaps we did or didn't want it or what happened to the so-and-so we planted I don't know I haven't been here so what we're doing here is growing plants using the fertility from the pond water which is being topped up with rainwater and at the same time giving lots of attention to the plants we have and it's basically aquaponics but a bit more time and attention and of course it's always important to remember that the other aspect of this is that we're getting out in the sunshine we're enjoying some fresh air and we're just basically having a great time