Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Yep - the camera goes with me.

Fishies (tilapia) appeared overnight - must be magic or something. There were 10 kilos of tilapia, each one between 4 to 6 inches. They are very happily swiming around making poo. I tested the water - it came up neutral (7.0 to 7.5)

I planted the first tomatoe (found it in our nursery) and gathered up all my seeds for making my plans for Monday. I think we will start most of them in the nursery except the large seeded stuff - makes sense.

My idea is to use the ponds we have and the nursery as - well nurseries for baby veggies and baby fishies. Then, fatten them up in the aguaponics system for better growth and better flavor.

Keep a daily test routine going CRT... especially ammonia and nitrites...

While you have a fairly large volume of water... at that size the fish a pretty good poo makers.... and even with the size of your growbeds, your system isn't cycled yet....

Until it is cycled, there's nothing to process the solids, and ammonia/nitrites into nitrates for the growbeds/plants.......

Them fish will keep pooping as you're cycling.... it will have an accumulative effect.....

Be vigilant .... and have enough water on hand to affect up to a 50% water change if needed.

I will be checking the water daily for ammonia - nitrites is a problem because I don't have any way to test them yet (can't find a test for it yet) - I will be in the USA in March and am hoping to find a more complete test.

I can change out all the water if I need to. By worse case, what is the most water I should change out per week? All of our water is well water and appears to be very neutral.

The answer to that is it depends on the dilution of ammonia needed to stay at reasonnable levels.
Maybe taking a bit of mud for the top layer soil of the sides of the ponds would seed the bacteria nicely.
You could feed the fish every other day during a week or two to let the bacteria settle down in the gravel and keep the nitrogen levels low.
What are you feeding the fish with? If it is with fishfood keep it slowly increasing.
The visual aspect of fish suffforing of ammonia or nitrite spike is slow fish breathing more than normal, on the survival mode: breathe, breathe and breathe, don't eat and don't move. It is likely to happen on the evening because of the fish activity

The answer to that is it depends on the dilution of ammonia needed to stay at reasonnable levels.
Maybe taking a bit of mud for the top layer soil of the sides of the ponds would seed the bacteria nicely.
You could feed the fish every other day during a week or two to let the bacteria settle down in the gravel and keep the nitrogen levels low.
What are you feeding the fish with? If it is with fishfood keep it slowly increasing.
The visual aspect of fish suffforing of ammonia or nitrite spike is slow fish breathing more than normal, on the survival mode: breathe, breathe and breathe, don't eat and don't move. It is likely to happen on the evening because of the fish activity during the day.
If it is in the morning it means a lack of DO in the water
All the fish problems can be found by a close watch of their activity so keep at it to know what is the normal activity and then you'll know when there's trouble because the behavior will be different.
Hope it helps

Thanks - I figure that made sense. With many things - first observe normal, then react to changes to the norm.

Actually, I'd suggest not feeding at all for the first few days. Then if ammonia stays low, begin feeding every other day lightly. Fish can go a long time without food, but ammonia and nitrite spikes can be nasty.

The plan so far is to feed them at the beginning to make sure we get some poo - then stop for a bit. But I will watch them closely. Until I am sure that the system is cycling - I will be giving food for the level of ammonia - not for growth of the fish.

A slow build up of poo is better than spikes, the point of cycling is to increase the different levels of population and inputs at the same speed.
The limiting speed is the bacteria poupulation growth, having a starting spike will not be good as the bacteria won't be enough to cope. Ammonia won't diffuse but stay there waiting for the bacteria to decompose it.
And it will fragilise the fish at after a stressful event increasing risk of sickness and slowing down the process by salting the water and reducing the fish load.
Build up slow better than start and stop i think.
And the growth of the fish is included in the ammonia production you can't dissociate them.

Cool - then we will closely watch the system - though I expect to kill some fishies along the way - lets not do it deliberately.

Well, surprise, surprise - no fishies have died in the start up of the system. It has been a couple of weeks and all fishies appear to be very healthy and happy. I did have to have some discussions with some over enthusiastic feeders though... But, I just scoop out the excess and gave it to Silky, the mud puppy (our Cocker Spaniel). He disposed off all excess rather rapidly.

We have seedlings started in the nursery now - we should be transplating in the next week or so. We shall see.

The water in the fish tanks smells fresh (for a day or so it didn't) and the system seems to be cycling very well. It took a while to get the autosiphons working correctly - but they are now.

I did find some test strips that test 5 things - ph, ammonia, nitrates, nitrites, and hardness. A one minute test from what it looks like. I still have the other tests for ph and amomonia which I can use if I need to.

I tested the water - ph, hardness, ammonia - all good - nitrates a bit high but not terrible.

Looks like we need to get somethings growing. I am putting a connection for a hose on the system so that when the nitrates get too high, we just water the little trees in the nursery. Shouldn't lose good fertilizer.

Cool!
Now we know that it works how can you make us wait for pics?

The test strips are not the most accurate, but will do for ballparking purposes.