Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

more veggie pics

Man i went out last night about 9 pm to the greenhouse. I looked at my tomatoe plants to find just stems left. i got to looking closer and found this big green worm wearing my plants out. i found 6 of them in my growbed. they were about 3 inches long and the size of my thumb round. how do they get in the beds. it got me scratching my head. lol

here is another shot of that beautiful corn footage. LOL

Tomato horn worm!!!

Glad we don't have those here in Aus; pull them off and feed them to the fish... They're vicious

I made pancakes out of them. lol i didnt know if they stung or what. i pulled 6 off last night. them thing just give me the creeps. lol

Man Just got Finished with my cucumber climbing wall. I hope it helps out some on the room they take up.

Looking a bit droopy lol, but am guessing thats because you just shifted them up onto your new growing walls. Just be consciences of how much shade you create and where the sun is, other wise you may have a dark spot in your grow bed with limited options to plant it out with??? 1 Option is to run it along the roof away from the GB's in different directions. But the cucumber looks like it is going gun hoe, cant wait for mine to start flowering.

i got a few new veggies poping up. i hope my cucumbers will perk back up.

Pull early fruit and flowers on capsicum plants.

Aim for vegetative growth before you let it set fruit, a foot or two of bush is a good start

That is a good tip! I never really did anything special with my peppers, and I get decent production, but I could see the wisdom in letting it beef up some first.

The flower that appears between the first set of forks (capsicum varieties shoot off into two apical meristems early into their growth) is especially important to remove... I always see peppers growing in this position.

i got some more pics

More pics

Hello, and sorry I havn't wrote in such a long time. I started a job out of town, and I am gone a long time. my greenhouse was doing quite well up until about a month ago. I had the same banana peppers and bell pepper plants since last year. That was pretty cool. I recently got a bunch of aphids on everything in the greenhouse and its slowly getting all the plants. I tried insectisitle soap, (even sprayed seven dust on it. I put spirement and peppermint around the plants, with no results. I even bought ladybugs but they didn't stick around very long. I recently bought 5000 eggs of lacewings. hopefully that will help. Other than that everything is going down the drain. On a positive note, I have shown this greenhouse to a lot of people and they are all in amaze. It does grown faster than conventional gardens. I had four squash plants (before the aphids got to them), and they got huge. One plant had at least 10 squash setting on it. Its totally amazing how all this works. I'm almost to the end of my rope. Im about to set the fish free and shut down and let all the aphids die and start over. I know that is a sucky way to do it but I don't know what to do.

You hit the nail on the head when you said you where gone along time. My experience with AP and anything horticulture related is that when you ignore things for long periods of time, they often can bite you. If you haven't already, I would remove and destroy any plants heavily infested. Try some more AP safe products and then replant in the Fall. The fish will be fine, just check water weekly and cut back the feed a bit. I've had good luck with both lacewings and ladybugs, as well as Neem, and Botaniguard. I never spray the Neem near the FT and spray late in the day on a clear day. I have tilapia and they have not showed any signs of stress. Both of those products are gentle on your beneficials as well. The biggest thing is once you get things cleaned up...inspect. If you can monitor and see the bugs starting, it's much easier to get them under control early. You have a beautiful system btw. Good luck!