Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I went out last night to catch some cobbler and saw quite a range of fish that i could net. I will head out tonight and grab some.
I have a small aquarium inside with a few bait fish i caught in the shallows. Might add an LED growlight and a small growbed to this.

This morning i discovered one Samphire plant that has new roots and a small amount of growth!
This is one i did not plant, i just left it in a shallow hole in the grow bed media where i am growing some algae and seaweed.
Shows at very least that the salt water didn't kill the samphire, just shock and bad transplanting.
I didn't cut back the samphire when i planted it and this section had only a small bit of growth so it didn't dry out as fast as the others.
My guess is that when transplanting samphire, you have to trim off all the growth and cut it back to mostly roots.

congratulations on the growth, have you thought about using pigface?

Thx for the idea Fabian, R
researched it last night and looks like it might work. Now, to find some.

no worries

How are your saltwater trials going, krozbolt? Any chance of an update?
When I first set up a very large temperate marine aquarium back in the 1980s everything went along swimmingly, with all manner of wild caught inhabitants, until some months down the track when Perth had several days in a row above 40deg C. I found it just too difficult to stop the aquarium temperature from rising too far and eventually lost everything within a few hours. It was a horrible mass kill.
I mention this because I see temperature control as a much greater challenge for you than finicky feeding habits and recovery from hook damage.

I second this! So very interested in having a samphire system with salt water fish

Well, i am back!
I moved house and have just set up the saltwater system again.
Was very handy having a saltwater system at home as i could use it as a holding tank.
I need to cycle the system again and will be adding fish and plants again in the next few days.

Some things have changed:

Bigger pump
More Air
Bigger solar panel (175w)
3 fishtanks
More time!

stay tuned....

We will....

Hope you found the box that you packed the camera in

Productive weekend.
I decided to build a biofilter. This will hopefully allow me to concentrate on making the fish happy to start with before i add plants.
This is how i put it together:

Blue barrel with the top cut off

I tried to keep this as simple as possible.
Just a stand pipe which overflows to the growbed and the barrel is filled from thw top.


Only put 3 bags of Clay in this as these ones float a bit and once water is added will fill to the top.



The "coco pops" are the new pebbles from BYAP.
I think they are great for a biofilter because the float a bit which should help circulation.

Added 2 Blue swimmer crabs today.
Will cycle the system with these and start planning the expansion.
Have added some ulva seaweed in the second tank.
Ammonia is way up to 5ppm.
Blue swimmers have a high tolerance to ammonia but would be good to have the system cycled soon.

One thing i have done is salt my freshwater system with ocean water from this system.
Will see if the added spectrum adds any benefit.
check out
http://www.ocean-grown.com/elements.html

How did I miss this, what an awesome idea. I'll be really interested to see how the ulva grows, I love eating the stuff

Have just planted some ulva in the "growbed" and added some more blue swimmer crabs.
Putting ulva in the tank doesnt work as the crabs like to graze on it.
Kinda want to see if it can grow first.
System is cycling and has nitrite up a bit.
Hopefully will see a drop in the next week or so.

That makes sense... pity... because Ulva grows just fine in saltwater aquaponics...

I have the ulva in saltwater still, i just needed to keep it away from the crabs. i gave them prawn heads to make up for it.