Aquaponics - Salts

Here's something you don't see every day.

Unless you live at my house.

Adelaide water is internationally famous for being not very wet. In fact it's so dry we tend to convert it into beer and wine, where dryness can be considered an advantage.

It's full of salt and smells a bit like swimming pool water until you filter it through a brewery or vineyard because to make it slightly safer, they (in this case the "they" that is the water authority) add a generous helping of pleasant smelling chemicals.

Yum!

Interestingly when you distil or evaporate something, you only take the volatile chemicals up in the evaporation, and you leave behind the salts.

These are salt crystals growing on the clay ball media. They grow on the very top of only the top-most clay balls in the grow bed, and only when conditions are right.

I don't know what the right conditions are, but it's a safe thing to report, because crystals cant grow when conditions are wrong.

I'm going to add that to my short list of things you can say and not be wrong.

They taste of things carbonate, with a hint of things from my school science lab. Fairly neutral in flavour with nothing standing out that I can identify.





120 Things in 20 years, where we learn that, like store bought strawberries, spontaneously appearing chemicals in the form of aquaponics salts, taste less interesting than they look.