Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Ok, that's all I can take, for now. I hope someone gets something from these!

My garden continues to grow.

I've been dosing calcium carbonate, wood ash, Seaweed concentrate, and Hummonia. I noticed my raspberries and other plants showing low iron, so I whipped up a (hopefully) anaerobic iron-chelating denitrifying bio reactor. Whew, what a mouthful. Basically, it's a small barrel with layers of sand, charcoal, and iron, with minimal water flow through the vessel. This forms an anaerobic zone where anaerobic bacteria can convert nitrate into a gas. In the process, if Fe2+ iron is present, it will be converted to Fe3+, or something, which makes it plant available. It's been running for about 1.5 weeks, and I'm starting to see some recovery in the raspberry leaf I've been watching.

There's lots of iron scrap in this world, and using it, instead of buying chelated iron, is definitely the better option.

I'm not worried about losing all my nitrates, because the drain from only one growbed feeds this bioreactor with water, with most of that spilling off the top, not percolating down through.

Plants are all responding well to the start/mid of summer. Lots of growth. Kiwis and strawberries are exploding. Marshmallow plant is 10ft tall. Lots of bush beans. Lots of tomato plants with small green toms, etc.

Also, I switched the system from 24/7 continuous flow, to alternating 1-hour periods of on or off. Most of the growbeds have a small hole drilled low on the drain standpipe, so the bed drains slowly during the "off" period. From my observations, I conclude that the plants prefer having a drain period where the roots are damp but not submerged.

One of my radial flow filters was leaking, right before I went camping for a week. So I took it out of service, reduced flow through the system, and replaced the filter barrel a week after I returned from camping. With the return to good levels of flow, the plants all perked up again, but they were sad, for a little while.

I posted a video below.

Ok, I'm back. Winter is over, Spring is here, and my garden is waking up.




I'm not sure if my video link is showing up, but you can see my latest update video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTbwSGWoPuE

There have been a lot of changes, too many to list.

The largest change is the (3) high semi-circle grow beds (not sure if I already posted about them).

The newest thing I've done is integrated an anaerobic/aerobic reactor as an optional side loop to the rest of my systems flow. This loops drains water from the fish tank, into a 75g duck pond, which overflows into the 250g IBC Anaerobic reactor, and then in to the bottom of a 55g barrel Aerobic reactor, and then overflows from a sub-surface inlet to discharge into one of my sump tanks.

I plan to put duck water and human food wast in, and collect methane from, the Anaerobic reactor. I've already begun the feeding process.

The aerobic reactor has a big air pump pushing air to the bottom of the barrel. The air then comes to the surface, through a big wad of orchard/trellis netting. This netting was used in my previous anaerobic/aerobic experiments, and proved to be an excellent source of surface area for bacterial growth.

Until the bacterial populations are established in the Aerobic reactor, I am not eating any food from my system, to reduce chance of getting an illness from incompletely treated duck waste. I'm not sure that this is even an issue, but better safe than sorry.

Sounds like you got the good ol' Humboldt Crud in your video! Your doing some interesting experiments with the digester. I've read some of your previous posts before, but I don't remember what kind of fish you keep in your system. Was it Goldfish? How low do your water temps get in the winter?

I saw online a while ago that HSU started doing aquaponics. I thought that was pretty cool...I lived up there for around ten years. I miss the redwoods, and the majestic beauty of Nor Cal sometimes.

Hi LA Will,
Yep, Humboldt Crud. Too much smoke exposure, and I don't mean forest fires

I'm keeping Gold Fish in the tank; I just accepted another dozen from my neighbor who was shutting down their pond. Check my other recent videos to see more of those fish.

Water temp over winter got pretty cold; I didn't do any measuring, but there were some freezing nights resulting in ice on the windshield on the morning. No fish deaths, though.

I've just posted another video about the Anaerobic/Aerobic side loop, check it out here https://youtu.be/1V5wOnlpxuI

or is it
here?

It's been a while since my last update. Not much has changed, although I have put a bit more work into the Anaerobic/Aerobic Mineralization loop.

Here's a video of my garden:
https://youtu.be/9Pjn4NpJves

And here's a recent video of my Mineralization loop:
https://youtu.be/CAzJOg5cyFo

Plants are all doing great. Lots of berries and fruits. Mineralization loop trades Nitrogen for Phosphorus, plus some other stuff that plants crave.