Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Does anyone have any experience with grow beds with curved bases? I have the opportunity to get some with curved bases, rather than square, and I figured they might work like gutters and help the water to drain better to the base of the bed?

I would say that a grow bed with a curved base would be advantage to square beds, as long as they are the right depth and volume for the job.

Cheers

Filip

Lots of people use curved bases here.

Half-barrels for example.
Also I think Synaptoman in one of his systems uses pipes a foot in diameter cut in half lenghtwise. For growbeds.

There's seems to be no problem at all in using most shapes of growbeds.

you just need to make sure you get a water tight seal where ur outlet on the base of the growbed is. Nothing a bit of aquarium sealer won't fix.

Or you can use hole-less siphons which I use in one of my growbeds with no problems. I think there is a thread about it and Myles started holeless siphons first.

(I think steve introduced the autosiphon first? Is he the 'inventor' of it or are autosiphons an old thing?)

One of the advantages of square GBs (probably the only one) is they give a uniform depth across the whole area and thus plants near the edge still have a reasonable depth to sink down into as opposed to a half barrel setup...both work very well

Another advantage....square GBs have a large flat base to stabilize the GB where as the half barrels need chunks of wood to stop them rolling

From the above you should be able to work out that I have flat beds VG

I think depth would be the only concern, wasn't too hard to add supports to the GB frames.

Yup, i do blue barrels and like to have them fairly high as I'm 185cm and hate leaning over to work on the system. (just lazy I guess )

bath tubs make good grow beds, right? right?

they have curved bottoms, right? right?

They also have depth

Since when are you 185 cm, lol you dwarf I think you have shrunken since last measured.

vegiegirl, how deep are the beds, that is the only concern.

Anything over 250mm in the middle is generally considered ok.

30 cm in the middle - but I can have them up to 45 cm (that's their present height - bought from a scrap yard) - I figured that was too much weight of gravel so was going to get dear old Dad to cut them down ...