Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

we have been picking a few cherry tomatoes every day for about the past week now. mostly out of the garden, but over the weekend the cherry tomatoes in the greenhouse started ripening too.



The garden is moving along nicely. We picked all of our beets on Saturday because we picked some radishes and noticed there were root maggots in them so figured we better get the beets out before they found them too.



we had a big pile of beets and didn't realize the kid could reach them from his stroller... he was pretty happy to be able to grab a handful of beets by the greens and play with them in his stroller.

any idea what this beetle is that has invaded my cabbage plants? I treated everything with BT three nights ago because I saw cabbage worms on the cabbage and broccoli in my small bed, checked two nights ago and the cabbage worms are gone but now I have these little beetles on the cabbage in my big bed.

looks like a flea beetle... Phyllotreta vittula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flea_beetle

will have to see how to get rid of it

I'm currently battling and losing against what I think are Cabbage Harlequin bugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlequin_cabbage_bug
Our little cabbage murdering bugs don't exactly look like these though. It is so hard for me to tell. That white spot on your pest looks a lot like the Harlequin cabbage bugs, Did it take a day like our pest to get infested? They seem to like Safer brand insecticide soap. Garlic pepper juice didn't faze them either. Yesterday I blasted them with Monterey Garden Insect Spray with Spinosad Concentrate which didn't do anything either. our cabbages are in dirt outside the greenhouse. Between hail grasshoppers and now these it appears to cement my theory that with our current climate and invasive pests the only way to grow anything is in a climate controlled greenhouse. Am I getting cynical again?

I'm trying to go the organic control way, but I have some seven dust that might get used if I keep discovering more and more pests.

+1 on the flea beetle ID, seems like that's what it is...

I finally finished trimming the windows and installing siding on the greenhouse this weekend. Still need to paint and stain wood but at least the siding job is done. First project I think I've actually finished this summer... Nice to feel like I finally accomplished something.

I added eaves trough to the greenhouse last night too. Was at Menards to get 2 pieces of J channel that I was short to finish the siding and saw they had their 11% rebate going starting yesterday so I decided to pick up the eaves and try my hand at it. I was surprised at how easy this went up. I had reinstalled some of the gutter on the house that had come down before we bought the house and it was a pain! Of course I was 20ft in the air leaning over the edge of the roof trying to attach it while my dad held it up off of my 18ft extension ladder because it was a long section I couldn't hold and install by myself at the same time. This new stuff for the greenhouse I bought the PVC gutters and it was super simple to cut and install. I might end up redoing all of my eaves on the house after we get our new roof put on because the old stuff looks terrible, this PVC gutter was easy to install, looks good, and wasn't terribly expensive so I might redo it after the new roof.



I had to buy a new toy when I was at Home Depot Saturday so I could rip boards for the window trim... got tired of ripping boards with my battery powered circular saw, so I bought a new table saw. I used to have a small craftsman table saw that the motor died on so I sold it several years ago before I realized it was easy to replace the motor... so I've regretted it ever since then... I wasn't thrilled to buy a Ryobi, but for $129 it is a nice little saw.


I also picked up enough PVC conduit to cover 3 more beds once it starts cooling down, that way I can try to keep harvesting in the garden a few extra weeks after first frost.

Finally, Friday I received my ladybugs that I ordered, I turned 1500 ladybugs loose in my greenhouse. It says 1500 is enough for 1000 sq ft for a light to moderate infestation... I only have like 250sq ft in the greenhouse so hopefully they will kill off any unwanted critters in the greenhouse before moving on to something else.


And I just realized this entire post happened backwards... ladybugs was friday, saw was saturday, eaves was sunday.

Your'e chronological error is totally forgiven. My ex-boss came out yesterday with his family to do something on their tower. They brought me another thousand or so Lady Bugs they found up on the mountain to go with the 3000 we recently put in our greenhouse. The first 1500 from the Bug Guys I believe escaped through the louvers in the exhaust fan. I put mosquito netting over that and they stayed put. The moral of this story is, if they can find a way out they'll use it en masse.

I don't have anything over my windows because they have the auto opener on them, so I'm sure they are escaping but I'm hoping they aren't looking for an escape if there is enough food for them to eat... if they eat all of the pests then escape then we'll be OK... hopefully they head straight north to the garden next.

Just finished hauling two yards of mulch to the garden to cover some of the landscape fabric that is being pushed up by weeds. Two yards of mulch is better than two yards of dirt or two yards of gravel, but I'm still dripping wet. Bad thing is I need another two yards probably to finish covering the half of the garden that isn't raised beds, then still need to mulch the walkways between beds too so probably another four or five yards of mulch to really get the garden in good shape where we don't have to worry about the weeds. Oh well little by little.

we had a whole bunch of basil that we brought home from my wife's work a couple weekends ago... was walking through their greenhouses to go water my wife's plants and saw a whole flat of basil plants with a free to take home sign so we took them all home. I had put the flat they were in on top of another flat because the one they were in had holes in the bottom, so then I filled the other tray with water. The roots have grown about 4" since we brought them home. I transplanted a few in to a raised dirt bed, then I put as many as I could in the NFT in open spots and the rest went in to the DWC.


my wife picked the first of our green beans yesterday. Got a grocery bag of them that we cleaned and canned about 13 pints last night which meant I ran to the store late last night to buy a new pressure canner because of all of the negative comments I got last year after buying the electric pressure cooker which claims it is safe for canning... we didn't die from botulism this past year, but I bought a proper pressure canner anyways last night. She thought we'll have another bag to pick this week before we go camping for a long weekend so we'll be able to take a bag of fresh green beans with us to cook while camping.


dinner last night was 100% home grown... green beans, tomatoes, and last year's piggy ham steaks! I know it would be more fitting for this forum if it had been fish... we haven't tried thawing any rainbow trout out since we put them in the freezer so will have to try it soon, but my tilapia are probably getting close to where we could sample some too I've seen some big ones in the greenhouse.

Very nice

Agreed very nice.

Not a lot going on in the greenhouse lately... it is still a jungle of tomatoes in there. I am still trying to figure out some plant issues, my basil looks to have iron deficiency as well as some of the tomato leaves. I have added chelated iron but it is DTPA which seems to only be available at 7.5 or lower pH. When I test I'm pretty close to 7.5, so I'm trying to bring the pH down to make the iron usable. I dumped in a small bottle of lemon juice which brought my pH down to about 7.2, so hopefully that will make it so the iron can be used by the plants. I have not cleaned my system in a while, so I thought it would bring the pH down on its own as the bacteria consume the waste, but it has not happened quick enough for my liking so the lemon juice seemed like a safe attempt to bring the pH down. I might try some vinegar in small quantities if I can't keep it down. I did add a few shelves overhead that I have to climb the ladder to get to... figured it was unused space and would help organize a little bit of the stuff we only use in the spring for starting seeds etc.

My tilapia appear to be getting quite large. I haven't caught any in a few weeks to look at their size but when they come to eat they look bigger than my breeders in the tank in my house (but I feed them a lot more, the breeders are on a maintenance diet vs. a get fat diet, so makes sense). I am planning on cleaning a few this week to try them out and see how they taste =)

We've been working on our garden quite a bit. I had put weed matting down but the weeds were pushing it up and pulling the 6" staples out of the ground, so now we've hauled about 6 yard of mulch out to the garden and it looks pretty fantastic. We still need another yard or two to finish but most of what we need to finish covering is under vine crops right now so the vines are keeping the weed matting held down, so we will finish mulching after we pull the pumpkins/squash/cucs/zucs for the year.

We have canned about 36 pints of green beans so far this year and still getting more every few days. Canned a dozen or so pints of carrots, pickled some peppers, froze a bunch of broccoli, have a bunch of cabbage that we picked that needs processed in some manner (but my wife cut her thumb pretty bad two nights ago working on it so had to go get stitches, so haven't got back to it yet). Just picked a 5 gallon bucket of tomatoes last night that we're going to have to start canning tonight. I have at least a dozen different pepper plants that are just LOADED, so probably can some and make pepper jelly out of a bunch soon. Busy time of year when it comes to the garden.

The big news is that I have convinced my wife that we need to build a second greenhouse! Our little 16x16 greenhouse is just way too small especially in the spring when we are starting a lot of seeds. When I had went to the guy down the road's greenhouse he had told me he had built his high tunnel for about $600 which I think is about 8ft x 8ft x 60ft if I remember correctly... so 480 sq ft (I only have about 250 sq ft in the greenhouse right now, so even a 480 sq ft greenhouse seems a lot better). I've spent a lot of time this past week looking at peoples DIY PVC hoop houses and the cheaper kit greenhouses I could get on Amazon and trying to figure out what I would need to do to be able to keep the greenhouse up through our winters... I think it looks like I should be able to do it with 1.5" PVC conduit, the big thing is to add center support so the PVC is all tied together and doesn't crush under the weight of snow. So I started sketching up a plan. I was thinking I would try and fit it in the existing 44x46ft garden space, so I went with something that would be OK in the area we don't have raised beds in yet. As I sketched out 10ft wide greenhouses I just could not come up with a plan to make it fit nicely and have room so we're not cramped like we are right now... so I bumped up to a 16ft wide and figured go 32ft long. I finally decided to show my thoughts to my wife last night and she didn't like having it in the existing garden space because it takes out her area for vine crops, so she told me to extend the garden out far enough to fit the new greenhouse in without giving up our existing space. So I think I have enough fence I will just need a few more T posts then I should be able to extend it enough. Then she told me instead of going 32ft I should max it out, so it looks like it will be 16ft x 40ft (640 sq ft). Should give us some additional options for where to grow things at and make it so we aren't quite so cramped in the current greenhouse. The plan will be that the new greenhouse will be season extension, the existing greenhouse I will continue trying to run year round through the winter. For now the aquaponics will remain in the existing greenhouse, but I do have her convinced to let me put a IBC tote inside the new greenhouse to store water in so we don't have to manually water everything we can just water from the IBC tote and have it preplumbed to the beds that will be in there. So I could potentially have a few fish in there, but it won't be recirculating so not a ton.