Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

this growbed will need wet feet vegies
watercress, tomato, mint, waterchestnut, perhaps some arum lily flowers (or is arum unwise in an aquaponics system)
what else can handle wet feet?

on the weekend i picked up 3 secondhand bathtubs, to become growbeds

Everyone seemed to miss this bit?? Thats most likely the reason for your fish deaths. Just a small amount of anti-caking is very bad.

Can I suggest you go with fishless cycling before buying fish? You are failing because you are jumping the gun. Fish should come AFTER you have everything running right.

Get your growbed online and water pumping. I would recommend adding 200ml of Humonia a day for 3 weeks. After 3 weeks of warm weather you should start registering nitrates. Add your plants to your GB's. After 4 weeks (assuming Ammonia and Nitrite are 0-0.25), add your fish, you can feed immediately, as per ratio's already mentioned in this thread.

This should be pretty well fool proof.

Also, stop fiddling with your PH, let your system run a while then decide what to do.

ahhh that was a long time ago, those fish all eventually perished, i think they were doomed before the salt anyway (and it would have been very diluted anyway). i've flushed the tank a bit since then, and have been aging the water for the last 6 months or so.

the next round of aquaponics is in process of being built, this time i will have the growbeds operational before i add fish.

I've now got 3 bath tubs as grow beds, filled with a 'popcorn' scoria. (about 2/3s the density of normal stone)
also, i have put seeds in the grow beds (generally in jiffy pots first)
the water was about ph of 6 so i bought some eco-rose, and threw enough in to bring the ph up to about 6.8 or 7.
then i got BUBBLES
it turns out eco-rose does contain a surfactant.
have i just poisoned my water or will this be okay?
has anyone else here used eco-rose with their fish?

It's supposed to be okay.
I get bubbles from Maxi-Crop too. Wonder if there's a surfactant added on purpose in order to get it to spread in soil / on foliage.

Just off the top of my head.

Rick

I sometimes just get bubbles. I know some people have used eco rose without problems so hopefully some one with experiences with it can tell you the details.

I've added EcoRose directly to the fish tank on many occasions...

What makes you think it contains a surfactant.... it's a powder, and whenever I've mixed it with water/seasol... I've never seen anything that suggested so...

' It contains a food-grade potassium bicarbonate, (seaweed for its) alginates which help the product stick to foliage, and a surfactant system which helps spread the product on the foliage surface.'
http://www.gardenbarn.com.au/featuredpr ... rotectants

a hint from the manufacturer
http://www.ocp.com.au/webcontent6.htm

as far as i can guess, eco carb and eco rose are the same product, just a packaging/marketing difference, (ie eco rose is the 500gram consumer version of eco carb)

green water (algae). How green is water allowed to be for sleepy cod fingerlings?
considering the sleepy cod came out from a dam, whereas perch fingerlings are breed within more plastic confines?

You can always cover your tank for a while if your concerned...