Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have a bee handling pollination chores the last few days

Lettuce, celery, broccoli and kale in this bed.

I need to learn more about plant management; my tomatoes and cucumbers are a bit out of control

The zucchini isn't out of control, yet.....

That's about where my zucchini is at right now! How long ago did you plant everything?

I started cycling the first week of December 2014 and started planting shortly after. I think the one grow bed with the out of control tomatoes are original. The plants produced fruit when conditions weren't ideal and when I finally sorted out some of the nutrient deficiencies they went completely nuts, vegetatively speaking, and stopped producing. I pruned them back pretty severely recently and they're finally starting to produce again. The only other original is the big broccoli plant. I'm pretty green when it comes to gardening; can anyone tell me why all my attempts at growing broccoli result in huge blooms of small yellow flowers and none of the edible green things I'm used to seeing on my plate?

Had a bit of a crisis last night. I was feeding the fish one last time at about 11:30pm and decided to take a look at them. I can't see all of them when I feed because most stay on the bottom of the tank and I only see the ones going after the food. The water from the pump and the aerators really churn up the surface of the water. Anyway, I found four dead fish; two lying on the bottom of each tank. I scooped them out and did a quick test for ammonia. What I found freaked me out a bit.



New rule for me! Eyeball my fish "every" day or test for ammonia daily!

Had a bit of a crisis last night. I was feeding the fish one last time at about 11:30pm and decided to take a look at them. I can't see all of them when I feed because most stay on the bottom of the tank and I only see the ones going after the food. The water from the pump and the aerators really churn up the surface of the water. When I turned them off I found four dead fish; two lying on the bottom of each tank. I scooped them out and did a quick test for ammonia. What I found freaked me out a bit.



New rule for me! Eyeball my fish "every" day or test for ammonia daily.

So now I was in panic mode because I'd never had to deal with an ammonia spike before. I initially started dumping rainwater from my outside collection tank directly into my sump. Then I realized that the water was quite a few degrees colder than the system water and stopped. I didn't want to add rapid temperature change to the already toxic environment. I grabbed a small pump and started transferring water from my top-up IBC's on either side of the fish tanks. I also needed a way to flush the ammonia rich water from the system at the same time as I added the clean rainwater so I found a couple garden hoses and connected to the cleanout on the sump system piping and ran the hoses out the back door.

By 4:30am I had both top-up IBC's contents (550 gallons) transferred to the system and the same amount of nutrient and ammonia rich water went out the back door. I'm kinda curious to see what happens to my grass out back in the next few weeks. I also teared up a bit thinking about all of the chelated iron flushed from the system last night. That stuff is expensive; anyone know a good place to buy chelated iron in bulk?

That was all of the system temp water I had available, so I called it a night.

Here's a pic of the poor fellas that bought it last night



Took this the next morning; they weren't looking so fresh anymore

Sorry to hear about the fish. Lowering the temp a bit isn't a bad idea since it makes the ammonia less toxic. Lowering the pH is another way but there are limits to how much the fish can take. Sounds like you did alright though once you caught the problem. You may see more fish deaths over the next few days, hard to say but keep your eye on them. Any idea what caused the ammonia spike.

Depending on your pH you may not need to add the chelated form of iron, it's still good to have on hand though.

I was very relieved to find that no more fish had died overnight and the ammonia tested 0ppm! I wasn't expecting it all to be gone. Bacteria's definitely doing it's job!

Checked again about 1:00 pm this afternoon and found this



He looks healthy enough. Wish I knew why they are dying

Thanks for the tips! I will definitely be watching them closely from now on. These things can escalate quickly!

Hey Scotty, you're probably the one to ask. I think I double posted a couple back. How do I delete one of them?