Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Winter Cleary? Sounds like you're getting geared back up but winters not quite over, did I get that right?

Winter Cleary I grow all year round. If you buy from a supermarket use the root

Ah, you must mean what we call Celery - something was lost in the translation and the only Cleary I could find online was a pine tree.

Cheers

Sorry about the mistake celery is what I meant. .Soon will be planting tomatoes and lettuce .

I enjoyed the challenge . Glad to hear your season is getting started and that reminds me I need to get cracking on some flower seedlings

nasturtiums plants are good to grow, I keep one all year round has survived the winter without heating.On holiday last year lost my goldfish, have only bought two giving regular water changes also keep gudgeon good ground feeders I cannot see them in the fish tank looking forward to the new season.

Keeping gudgeon ,theye transfered from the sum tank doing well

Cool Mr John, havnt heard of anyone keeping gudgeon here. I had a quick google but am still unsure of what they are like. How big will they grow?

Gudgeon are ground feeders I kept in the main tank suddenly they disappeared, I thought they had jumped out of the tank seven weeks later looking in the sub tank, they were quite happily swimming around .They managed to slip through the emergency pipe .gudgeon grow about nine inches in length - are quite a hardy fish native to UK waters. .interestingly the gudgeon managed too get into tthe emergency pipe which is two inches above the waterline

Winter is here Just returned from Canada I installed an electric fish feeder whilst away for the Christmas period it worked quite well fish doing alright .Growing Celery in Green House good hardy winter plant

Winter is upon us .What is the weather like in Canada London Area? anybody in Aquaponics out there any information on Solar heating for AP system, cost to run a pump on Solar heating ECT .Looking forward to the next growing season

Hey John !!

I'm deconstructing my systems and building a clayball blue barrel system in an 8x3m greenhouse
Unfortunately the school system went down hill as someone stole the pump that you generously donated towards

I'll hopefully get that up and running again when I donate my pump.

Good to see your still active on the forum

I am about 200 miles west and just a little south (maybe 20 miles south) of London, Ontario, so I would expect their winters are fairly close to ours. They might get a little more snow than us because we are just on the far reaching edge of where lake effect snow hits from Lake Michigan... they have Lake Huron and Lake Erie to deal with so they might get hit with a little more lake effect, but otherwise temps I would think are fairly close. We are having a warm spell this week - it has reached above freezing and today we are actually at 54F (12C)... London is 47F (8C) right now so a little cooler. They might be a day behind us with our weather pattern because that is about what we had yesterday. We had a good three weeks with -10F (-23C) prior to this warm up, then it looks like tomorrow we will be going back to about 29F (~ -2C)) and Saturday 18F (-8C) so it won't be a long lived warm up...

So far with a somewhat passive solar greenhouse setup (my design isn't quite right for full passive solar because my greenhouse is 16x16 foot, where passive solar suggest 2:1 length x width so 16x8, 24x12, 32x16 etc. to fit more water barrels in for passive heating... I couldn't come up with a design I liked that met those needs, so I stuck with my plan for 16x16 due to my budget restrictions). My coldest temps in my greenhouse have stayed above freezing, so I still have lettuce, kale, swiss chard, broccoli still growing. I have pepper plants which still have peppers on them but are no longer growing, and tomato plants which I trimmed back too far prior to winter that have pretty much died now.

I've also built a hoop house with no heat sources... it gets down to ambient air temp quickly when the sun goes down but it warms up quite nicely during the day when the sun is shining so I think once I get dirt in there I'll be able to grow greens in there through winter too even though it will freeze at night, from what I've read a lot of greens are OK with freezing as long as you don't harvest them until they thaw out.

I did just add a propane heater to my greenhouse but I have not been operating it yet because we have some plants from my wife's work in the greenhouse which need to be moved out to the garage to go in to dormancy before I warm the greenhouse up with the heater (hopefully we might move them tonight since the weather temperatures should be similar air temp in the greenhouse to outdoors tonight)

I have plans to add passive solar heaters to the greenhouse but I did not get it done before winter, so better luck next year hopefully.

If you look up markb's thread on here about passive solar greenhouse with active systems he has a better design than I do and has done better than I have -- he still has tomatoes growing, although his climate is a little bit warmer than me. He might be able to provide an idea of costs of heating with active systems, but he has a good solar grid for power too so not really paying for supplemental heat either.

What might be a Good idea looking at gardening programme ,if you drill holes in a plastic Bucket sink down in the growbed fill with compost and worms then add ,say food wast etc the worm produce worm tea good fertilizer , this system is used in raised Garden beds .Any thoughts on this ?