Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Things will be find, still have plenty of fish and the ducks will soon be in the freezer so won't do too much to the banana. All is good.

So October was a crazy busy month for me. I think we were home all of about 5 days during October.
Things did fine and it's time to do some clean up and projects.

But then I got distracted by this billboard liner that some one gave me. Hard to turn down free some times.


So I have several parts of the garden that I want to plant but we just have not done anything to prepare the ground. It is past time for planting all the cool weather crops so what is a person to do.
Well there is that old wood grow bed that has been sitting round making the place look a bit trashy, how bout I use some of that liner and make a wicking bed


Add some chips in the bottom and then mushroom compost over the top, should grow a few things nicely.

But that only used a fraction of that 48 foot by 14 foot billboard.



Ya know, I've been thinking about testing out a raft bed sometime........

Here we go another addition to the big system as it marches along the property line
What do ya say, the fence wire worked for the duck bed, maybe I can make it work for a raft bed cause I'm certainly not going to buy more wood for the termites.



And laying out the liner

These old billboard liners are definitely not as tough as the EPDM I'm used to working with.



And the wire fencing will need some reinforcing I'm sure, just need to see how much.



And the temporary drain screen, don't want the leaves to clog the long drain plumbing back up to the sump tank.

Love your work TCL - keen to see how it performs !

IT LEAKS!

But lets move on to the bowing issue. Here is the picture from the morning after the previous posts pictures. I had sort of made wire stays across the top but I didn't secure them very well, they didn't stay, they sprung.



so I drained it down and went to buy stakes and by the time I got back I could put some ratchet straps on to suck it in and allow me to pound in the stakes.



And Stakes all pounded in, that was easy cause I bought one of those heavy pipe with handles post tools. Pounded in those little stakes like butter. It is one of my new fav tools. I'll be pounding in stakes and posts all over the place now.

So in addition to the stakes I put the stays across and secured them better this time.



And I will add wire arches over the stays so I can secure frost blanket or shade cloth to keep the leaves out of the system.



And just because of the three picture limit, I'm gonna throw in a shot of the main part of the system here before any really bad cold hits as It may look very different after a frost. No greenhouse this year at all.

Grr, I mentioned it leaks right?

Got up this morning to check on the new bed, still leaking but the bowing problem seems solved.



I fear the leaks are not going to be slime healed and the used billboard liner is just so brittle and easy to abrade that I'm either gonna have to turn this into a wicking bed, or get some EPDM to put in it. I must admit that having handled EPDM so much, I was probably not gentle enough with this stuff. I'm not used to walking on egg shells around my pond liner. One has to be really really unlucky to accidentally puncture the heavy duty EPDM pond liner. I've dropped knives and tools on it with not a problem. This billboard liner, I fear it would definitely not stand up well to being a gravel bed. So any of you who get one of these for use as fish tank liner or DWC bed liner, hopefully you are lucky and get one that isn't too old and isn't as brittle but also be rather careful with it as you place it since rough edges or corners can easily cause tiny leaks.

I know it's blurry but you can still see the shinyness of the water spraying out!



That isn't the only leak, there are many. Bought a 8' wide by 35' long EPDM liner on ebay today.
I just have to decide if I will leave the existing liner in place as an "underlay" or if I will remove it and turn an entire garden bed into an in the ground wicking bed.

But on a happier note, while the sun was nice on that part of the garden this morning, I installed the arches.



They are made of the wire sold for tensioning up fences. Fairly heavy and stiff (my thumbs really hurt even though I found myself a set of fence pliers for bending it.) I think I will try out using some of this stuff in some other areas of the garden as well. Should be great for holding netting or shade cloth over the blueberries. Perhaps instead of trying to contain the chickens. perhaps I'll just do little hoops over the garden beds and cage my veggies under netting. I wonder if this will help against the bunny rabbit or if he will just chew through the netting to get my broccoli again. Might have to do chicken wire around the stuff the bunny likes.



So the fence posts and stays seem to be holding, just need to get some better liner to make a real go of a raft bed. The water going to the raft bed is from a pump in a gravel bed. As it is now the raft will get intermittent feed as I simply used one of the feeds of the indexing valve to go to the raft bed and two of the water tank beds are sharing a feed.

This intermittent flow and the fact I don't really want to get another air pump to aerate the raft bed means I probably need to do rafts that leave as much water surface as possible exposed to air. As in suspend the plants in boards above the water rather than rafts floating on the water. I'm gonna try some PVC pipe pontoons for the rafts to see if that will work.

Very impressive, even with the small issues.

Like the photo of the main system to.

i have to say \TC, that is one hell of a system
how the do you keep track of all that poly pipe?

Thanks,

Just a bit at a time.

Water flow, signal flow all kinda similar. For a hobby I do plumbing/garden projects, for my work, I plumb electrons (some people call it doing lighting, sound, video but essentially wiring stuff up is like plumbing the electrons.)

So perhaps by next week I'll have the replacement liner and maybe I'll have figured out some rafts by then. I also need to get sorted with materials and organizing for the workshop I'm planning for the beginning of next month to expand the 300 gallon system. That is a much simpler/tidier system being as it hasn't grown/changed/evolved the way the big system has.

Are you going to grow duckweed between the rafts. Help block out the light from getting to the water.

you never cease to inspire tc!

I would probably try to keep the duckweed and raft area separate but I might use it to grow duck weed, especially if I am not impressed by the rafts production or ease of use.

I will have to find out what my Muscovy ducks think of duckweed. The chickens were really unimpressed by it when I did try to give it to them.

If the rafts don't inspire me and if the ducks don't like the duckweed. Perhaps I'll modify the bed to grow some sort of animals to feed to my catfish. Like small shrimp or midge larva or whatever else I can think of.

There is also the possibility of growing more water plants over there maybe.

Plenty of options to keep that bed busy.