Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Great Read Stephanie, thanks for sharing.

+1

I used to add about 2 to 4 gallons every other day.
At the new place we actually have a shaded patio for it and that seems to have helped alot, so now it's about 2 to 4 gallons every three days.

So i guess this little system of mine has been going for 2 and a half years. I've gotten a lot of basil, chives and green onions out of it. The chives are freaking amazing. I've had a small chive plant in there for a year and a half now, and it seems to grow so fast that i put chives in everything.

I have a bunch of guppies, and mollys in it. And a whole lot of gollys in it. A golly is my name for the guppy/molly hybrid. They tend to over populate the tank so I've had to donate more than a few to the pet store, and because of the overpopulation I've had a problem with solid removal. So i just clean it with an aquarium siphon every once in a while. Now that I'm no longer in an apartment i just use the extra water to water all the plants around the house.

I did have to get rid of the plastic stand this was on shortly after we moved cause it didn't hold up well. My fiancée and his brother built a wooden stand for it. that has worked really well for everything.

The little fountain pump we bought for this is still running really well and the only time it's been turned off is when we moved and sometimes when I'm cleaning the tank.

Hey Stephanie... good to hear things are still kicking along...

How about a pic or two of the system now?

As requested here are some more pictures

There's a little bit of calcium buildup on everything....


I just added this sage last night and here are the chives that don't quit.


All of my fish, the picture didn't turn out too bad.. except for the streaks and glare.

Also we're starting work on a much larger backyard version.

The main fish tank is going to be a large pond. We've started digging it but it's not very deep yet. The ground here sucks because it is hard and has a lot of clay in it.

it's about 14 feet wide at the widest spot. And we're planning on making it between 3 and 4 feet at the deepest. It'll have steps going down, so the outer edge will be about 1 foot deep, then another drop for two feet then and another for 3 or 4 feet.

Pictures:




Yes the pond is in the shape of the skull. This is one of those compromises that go with long term relationships. The Texan(my fiancée) informed me that all of landscaping had too many flowers in it so the pond has to be in a shape of the skull. Plus it would be cool to see a skull on google maps.

I have a lot of concerns already.
I'm not sure how big of a pump I'm really going to need. I think if i did my math right this thing might hold up to 10,000 gallons and one of the few pond pumps i saw on azponds.com that could pump that much was over a thousand dollars. And that sounds like a huge amount of water coming really quickly out of a pump. Well at least compared to my little fountain pump that i have right now.

We were planning on doing several rows of the blue barrels for the grow beds. We haven't starting making any of the grow beds first. We wanted to get the whole dug first. And i'm not going to use a loop siphon this time. I've done some playing around with bell siphons, and Affnan's valve and those are pretty slick.

I want to add a sump to this as well and I haven't made any decisions on that yet. We kind of leaped into this head first with the idea that we wanted to get as much digging done as soon as possible before it got too hot.

Cool, Phantom pond....

You won't be needing any sump for that system, generally the sump is the lowest point of a system, your lowest point looks like it will be the fish tank, so no sump required. How many beds are you going to have, with something that size you can size your pump down a bit to your growbeds.

I'm hoping i'll be able to get 24 of the half barrel beds in at first, and then expand later if i can find the room. I have a friend who works at a bakery and she's bringing me their empty barrels has they go through them.

Do you have caliche to dig through? If you're doing that without a jackhammer, then
(I lived in Tucson for three years, and learned quickly not to dig...)

Having a sandal in the pic is not a substitute for toes!

I don't think it's caliche. It's some weird mix of sand and red dirt not quite clay but close that's packed together really tight. We did some more digging today and filled up that hole with water first which helped. So we were digging in mud instead of just picking at the dirt. We still needed a pickaxe in some spots but otherwise we moved a lot of dirt in a few hours. My parents were visiting today otherwise we probably would have done more. Though I think I'm glad we didn't because my arms feel like mush today.

Speaking of skull-shaped tanks ... planning it to be anything like, oh...