Post the Twenty-Fourth

Fresh vegetables.  Surprisingly difficult to get in the Antarctic.

Well...  Eh.  Maybe it's not that surprising.



Fresh fruit and veg are brought in on the ship during resupply, but by that stage "fresh" is a relative term.  Indeed given the state of some of the cos lettuce I have had the pleasure of working with, "fresh" means "not entirely turned to brown mush".

Frozen and tinned goods are OK as far as they go, but not everything can be frozen or tinned.  And let's face it - nothing beats fresh stuff.

So what is the solution to keeping people supplied with their vegetables?



Hydroponics!

(Stop sniggering there, you druggies down the back!)

Each of Australia's stations has hydroponically grown vegetables on site, carefully controlled so as not to convene any of the myriad anti-ecological-contamination rules.  Davis has its own hydroponics hut.  And here it is:

The Davis Botanical Gardens

Beautiful, isn't it?  A delight to behold.  A veritable Eden.

Well, as beautiful as two shipping containers that have been welded together can be.

For a week I shared the responsibility with one other expeditioner to conduct the daily hydroponics observations - we conducted observations on alternating days.  It didn't involve much, other than taking measurements of the chemical status of the water, its temperature and volume, and making adjustments to the set-up where necessary. However, given that the responsibility was all about keeping alive everyone's freshies, I kind of had to take it seriously.  To put it mildly.

I did not want to be responsible for killing off the winterers' only source of fresh food.  No indeed!

On this particular morning I took Swim-Swim with me to conduct the observations, and he brought along the camera.

Opening the door, you are presented with this view:

Foyer

Hydroponics consists of three rooms - the entrance foyer, the leafy veg and herbs room (left) and the flowering plants room (straight ahead).  The very first step is to wash your hands in the sink with an antiseptic to prevent inadvertant contamination from other vegetable matter.  So Swim-Swim and I did that.

Note, there appears to be more of that emergency hogwash here.  Interesting.

So, turning left we begin with taking our observations of the two tanks in the leafy plant room.  On the left of this image is where the lettuces are grown.

Lettuce?  Where?

The lettuces had only been harvested the week before and replaced with seedlings, so those racks are not very exciting to look at.  Unless you find bare racks exciting to look at...

Note the unusual quality of the lighting.  Those lights give off both visible and ultraviolet light, as well as heat.   They are used to mimic sunlight in that respect and, like sunlight, if you were exposed to that light for too long you would first tan and then burn.

Sort of like a tanning salon, but with foliage!


On the right hand side here we have some herbs and also some silverbeet.

Herbs.  No, not those kinds of herbs. 

Swim-Swim and I conducted our measurements of both of the watertanks in here, and then moved through into the flowering plants room.  Where, straight away we are confronted with an enormous cucumber plant, with fruit dangling from the ceiling.

Cukes

Turning left, it's clear that the flowering plant room is quite a bit more verdant than the leaf veg room.  In here we have some cucumbers, some tomatoes and some egg plants.  As well as a couple of species I could not identify because they had no fruit on them.

Fruity

 And some of that fruit is just about ready to be taken down to the kitchen.  Here, for example, is one of the most disgusting and vile vegetables known to humanity:  the eggplant.

Yep.  This bag of evil is almost ready.

For the life of me I can't understand why people eat these.  They'd be much more useful as missiles at a riot, I reckon, than as a foodstuff.  Still, each to their own.

Bleurgh.

Here Swim-Swim is checking that the water outflows from the tomato plants is free from root blockage.  He can be very helpful when he wants to be.

Providing assistance

Here's another one almost ready for harvesting - a cucumber.  (In case you can't tell for yourself what it is).

This is the bucket of goodies that I use to conduct some of the observations.  

Bag of tricks.  (Felix the Cat, the wonderful, wonderful cat...)

In there is a thermometer, a nutrient meter and an acidity meter.  I note the readings from each of those onto a sheet provided for each tank of water, and if the measurements fall outside the recommended levels then I take remedial action.  For example, if the nutrients are too low, fertiliser is added.  There is also an acid mix and an alkaline mix for adjusting the ph levels.

And here is our shelf of chemicals.  Many of these have a somewhat negative impact on human tissue if they come into direct contact, so we have some protective eyewear and heavy rubber gloves to wear when handling them.

There weren't any in Swim-Swim's size, so he had to wait while I did that.

Shelf of chemicals

And that's pretty much it.  After making sure that each of the 5 tanks are at the right temperature and chemical consistency, my work is done.  It doesn't take long - all up about 15 minutes to go through the procedure.

Unless you stop to take photos along the way.  Then it's a bit longer.

And I'm delighted to say that by the end of my week, nothing (and no-one) had died.  You'd have to call that a successful tenure, wouldn't you?