Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Instead of continuing to hijack G2N's thread I might as well start one of my own. Also it will allow me to track things a bit better instead of being spread all over multiple places.

So I've picked up a few IBCs and learned my first lesson. Ask what was kept in them before I bought them and if they were cleaned out beforehand. My IBC's were food grade and I was able to get them for fairly cheap but I had a heck of a time offloading them from the truck. It turned out that they were previously filled with a nice sticky syrup that had turned semi-hard due to being outside in the cold and the previous owners had left a large amount of it in the bottom of the IBCs. Ick!

Fast forward a couple weeks and now I have my IBC's cut and my tables set up and I'm ready to start my plumbing. This is a roughed out diagram of what I am thinking of running. I've used the different colors to better keep track of what parts I need to buy. And of course it makes the diagram a bit fancier.




Am I forgetting anything obvious?

Looks good to me

Hey, Tangent, you still around? I've neglected the forums for a while, but have been wondering how your trout are doing, and how you fared in the aquaponic vs. dirt garden competition with the wife.

My aquaponics system underwent a radical change from when I first set it up to when we started growing veggies. My hacking up of IBC's for grow beds did not meet the approval of she-who-must-be-obeyed as it made the backyard "Ugly". So we opted for Rubbermaid 50 gallon stock tanks. They were uniform in shape and design and were approved for use in the back yard. I did keep one IBC for the fish and half of one for the sump though.

This was our first year growing in an aquaponics system and we are chalking it up as a success.

My tomatoes were larger and juicier and overall just much nicer than what we grew in the soil.

Peppers were a failure, except for Thai Dragon Peppers which went wild in the system.

My broccoli grew out of control and I was looking forward to trying out until they were overrun with aphids. And by overrun I mean you'd think I had a layer of moss growing on the plant. Didn't touch anything else though, just all my broccoli.

Lettuce of course did fairly well as expected.

We planted some Sweet Williams just for fun and they did so well that I had to pull them out as they were just going crazy and they were pushing other plants out of the way.

Peas turned out much better in the aquaponics as well. The pods were larger and more plentiful then in her dirt garden.

All in all the plants did awesome.

My trout were doing great as well. They had hit the 10-12 inch mark and we had decided to keep them over the winter to see how big they would grow. I had a nice heater system set up that was keeping the water in the 50's on the coldest nights and all was going well. Until the day of the accident.

I was working on the system, just puttering around in the tank area and I accidentally unplugged the heating system and didn't notice. I DID notice when nobody came up for dinner a few days later and the thermometer was reading just above freezing. Oddly enough, I thought I would have a tank full of floaters, but for some odd reason they all sunk to the bottom of the tank instead. Fishsicles don't float? Who knew?

Here is bed 1 with some early tomatoes. You will notice that we ran some think PVC over the top of the tank and some twine attached to allow the peas and other climbing plants to work their way up.




Here is a shot of some lettuce we were growing in both dirt and aquaponics. You can see how healthy and full it looks.




More lettuce, I think squash in the background on the left hand side.




Here is a picture of one of the trout. The look you see on his face is of surprise at being flash frozen.





2014's System

We are adding a floating bed for lettuce and a bed for just herbs. We have also removed the IBC fish tank and have purchased a 625 gallon stock tank to use for fish. It will give them a bit more room to swim around in and I promise not prematurely freeze them this time.

That is one surprised fish. Sorry you lost them all; I'm guessing they probably weren't frozen enough to be safe to eat, huh?

Contrary to what my high school health teacher taught about how drowning people float ("it's a proven fact!") (no, it was not a terribly high-quality high school), I think the floating part doesn't happen until bacteria start multiplying and filling the tissues with gases. (She maintained that if you didn't know how to swim and needed to rescue a drowning friend, you could float back to shore on them. I am not, sadly enough, making this up.)

I wasn't confident I could keep my temps high enough for the tilapia, so they're wintering in the master bedroom. They keep busy building nests and making spawning motions, but I have yet to see any fry, so I think they're doing it wrong, or something. I'm thinking when the weather warms back up I'll keep just one pair inside and see if they do better when it's not so crowded and they've got a little more "pwivaxxy," as it's known around here these days. (Had to teach Gbaby the concept so she'd honor our requests to be allowed to go potty all by ourselves.)

Your plants look beautiful. Mine were more of a jungle, but then that fits the decor fine in my greenhouse, where the emphasis is more on function than form. I do not have Mrs. Tangent's gift for beauty and orderliness, either inside OR outside my house! Thankfully, Hubs is okay with living amidst my chaos.

I lost a lot of good greenhouse time to stupid health ailments this past year, which was really frustrating, since usually I'm almost never sick. I'm hoping for a healthier 2014, and hopefully getting the final growbed and barrels added in that I want. I also want to change my gravel out for hydroton, MAN that stuff is a joy to work with.

I had a lot less production than you'd expect, for as big and wild as my plants were. My coworker was saying the same thing about his dirt garden, and we got to speculating that it might be a shortage of bees with all the dying off they've been doing. I experimentally did some hand-pollinating and got a sudden uptick in tomato production, so I think we were on to something. I'm going to try to get some mason bees going this year, by offering them room and board in return for pollination services, and see if we can do a little better.

Good to "see" you again!

I wasn't 100% sure how long they had been dead and they had been resting in the crud at he bottom of the tank. I had a serious case of food poisoning once and I tend to be a little bit overly cautious about what I eat. You wouldn't think it looking at my, but I am! So no-go on eating the fish.




It's funny you should mention that. One guy I was watching on youtube insisted that you should put a few pices of PVC or set up something to allow for a bit of privacy for your tilapia. Apparently in a tank with 1 male and 3 females, it allows gives the females a chance to get away from the male when they aren't "in the mood".

As a side note, there is an semi-local farm that has set up a tilapia aquaponics system. Heart2Heart farms out in Sherwood has set up a system and they do tours and classes of their farming techniques. If you ever have time, check out their facebook or webpage.




Her gift for orderliness is more of an OCD thing. I'm more of a chaos person myself, but things out of place make her fingers twitchy.

The aquaponics didn't get too crazy but we had a jungle in the dirt section. The tomato plants overgrew and pushed out a lot of some of the other plants. I never did find my garlic plants in the mess of tomatoes. But our first year in the aquaponics was to see if it was actually a possibility instead of growing in dirt. Now that we've seen what it can do, we are going to focus on growing healthier plants. Trimming and caging them for maximizing growth and production. We weren't originally garden people, so each year we learn something new and get better and better at the process.




Awww.. I'm sorry to hear that. It sucks to be sick when all you want to do is go out and play.

Even in big bags, the hydroton was expensive, but I've really enjoyed working with it. If it's in the budget, I would certainly promote going that route.




I've done some research on bee-keeping and it really is alarming how many bees we have lost. You'd think we would be more concerned about the decline of such a critical link in our food chain, but we don't seem to be.

I do a bit of home brewing and have wanted to make a mead for a long time, but fresh honey is terribly expensive for the amount I'd need. Growing my own seemed like a possible solution if it wasn't for the fact that it has the potential to kill the wife. She is apparently deathly allergic to bee stings.




I'm glad to see you around also. I'm glad to hear that your fish are alive and well.

I have been asked to question you on the status of your goats. Are they all happy and healthy also?

Kind of neat to hear that your Talapia want and may reproduce. Sadly, I live in Northern California so Talapia are off limits

Wondering about trout - has anyone had them reproduce either on their own or did some harvesting of eggs and milt? I think it would be great to have a self-sustaining population if I kept a brood mare or two (or whatever you call them) and some males. I could see setting up a tank in a tank for the fry to get established and grow a bit before joining the general population.

The farmer I get my trout from is doing class on the 29th of this month on how he collects the eggs and puts them into a system where they grow into fishlings. He usually has the state agriculture people and college students come out to see the process. This will be my first year going, but I hear it's interesting. And best of all, his wife is making chili!

We lost one goat, Blue (the white one), to kidney stones a while back. Baby (the little brown one) got real sick recently, but Hubs got online and read a bunch of stuff and went all goat-doctor on her and pulled her through. The pygmies are as ornery as ever.

Hey, if you want to raise bees, you can keep your hives at our place!