In this informal video update, Rob Greenlee walks viewers through the current state of his backyard aquaponics greenhouse in Seattle during October 2013. He begins by releasing roughly 1,600 ladybugs to combat aphids, showing them crawling on basil and other plants. He notes internal greenhouse temperatures around 75‑76 °F versus about 40 °F outside, describing the environment as tropical. Greenlee highlights the growth of kale and basil grown from seed, and points out the installation of bubble‑wrap insulation on the exterior and reflective insulation on the interior to retain heat as the Pacific Northwest enters the cold season. He shows the fish tank, confirming the fish are healthy at the maintained temperature, and explains the grow‑light schedule—lights on in the morning and evening to supplement shorter daylight hours, not continuously. Throughout, he emphasizes the hands‑on, experimental nature of the project, acknowledging the workload but expressing enthusiasm for ongoing experimentation and learning.
Chapters
A bunch of ladybugs in our greenhouse. I released about 1,600 ladybugs in our greenhouse to work on the aphids that are in our greenhouse, and you can see they're crawling around on our basil, and it's really cool to have 1,000 or more ladybugs in the greenhouse. So I'll back up and I'll show you a bunch more that are in here running around in here. So you can see them on our little kind of nursery area, kind of all hanging out together and flying around in here. So you can also see them over here on our basil hanging out on this basil. They, they seem to really like to hang out on basil for some reason. I guess it's the same as us wanting to eat basil. So it's kind of cool that you can see they're like all over the place congregating in all sorts of locations. I'll zoom in as close as I can get without losing focus. You can see them really up close. Kind of hard with that foam to see them because there's no color contrast. I'll try and get them back up and you can see that's a, it's a large basil plant. It's about 75 degrees in here, uh, it's about probably 40 outside, so it's a, it's a tropical environment in here, no question about it. We got a huge kale. Growing over here, you can see. And our, our other raft bed is filling out. All these plants that you've seen here, we grew from seed, so they seem to be doing quite well and growing out. And you can see I got ladybugs all over the place climbing the walls. On the raft bed area here, you can see the little dark spots on the white background. But I just installed the bubble wrap, as you can see, on the outside of the greenhouse because we're coming into the cold season in the Pacific Northwest. And I'm about 3/4 of the way done with all of the insulation I'm going to put over the greenhouse and around. As you can see, I have this reflective insulation on the inside that will keep the beds warmer at night. And then the fish tank is down here full of fish. They continue to eat and be real happy at about 76 degrees, so they seem to be doing well. You can see I have grow lights in here that are keeping things really warm and toasty in here. Now certainly these lights don't stay on 24 hours a day. They're just on in the morning time and in the dusk time in the evening to kind of make up for the shorter days that we have on the growing side. So I'm still letting in natural light to to really grow all the plants in here. So anyway, that's, that's an update what's happening with the Greenlee aquaponics system in our backyard. It's definitely a project and it's a fair amount of work to keep up with, but it's kind of a fun project. There's a lot of cool stuff you can experiment with. That we're doing in here. So anyway, I'll keep everybody up to date with what's going on with it. So our, our journey continues. Thanks for watching. Bye.
