For this week, not much has changed. Tank cycling is a biological process that takes 30 days, and is depicted below:

At the moment, I’ve chosen to let the tank sit as the process depicted above plays out. In the meantime, I’ve been replacing about 10-15% of the water from the tank every two days and storing it in a stockpot. My plan is to soon dump the water I’ve been collecting into another tank so the water can sit and continue to build up the beneficial bacteria while I continue to test/get a hang of the aquaponics process in the tank I currently have set up.

My current plan of action is to essentially have 1.5 trials running at the same time. I’m currently holding off on fully setting up another tank until I get my first tank to be entirely self sustainable, however, by letting the beneficial bacteria to continue to build up while I wait for the other tank to fully mature, it will allow me to almost instantly set up another self sustaining tank.

In other developments, the plants have continued to grow. The lettuce seedlings have become rather lanky as its first leaves begin to grow in size. The roots of the kale plant are now reaching down through the basket and have put on considerable growth in the past two weeks. The lacinato kale plant, which I grew from seed over the summer, was plucked from my terrace garden and is now pushing out significantly narrower, wrinklier, more compact leafs, an indicator of surging health for kale plants.