Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I´m amazed of the speed everything is growing in. Have troubles with slugs and yellow spots at tomatoleaves and cucumbers. The slugs to hunt and the yellow areas to be cured by epsomsalt and potassium hopefully. Great strawberries every day now. Fish healthy and happy

Oh wow this looks fantastic. I totally forgot about your build. Impressive to say the least.

I agree you plants are really looking good.

You've got some very healthy looking Strawberries too. I'm totally envious. I had to pull ours from the strawberry towers because I couldn't control the water to them so they got water 24/7, which I think was the issue.

Yep, great set up, thanks for the update.

So is there a reason you couldn't control the water?

IMO a simple timer for the pump to the towers would work.

Wow just finding this, fantastic work! I think everyone needs to run out and build a huge fish pond like this and Boss' now... very nicely done!

The strawberry tubes look great. I just added NFT tubes to my setup but haven't got strawberries in there yet because I only have june-bearing strawberries that I haven't planted yet. I want to get some ever-bearing strawberries to put in the NFT. Thinking I might need a second NFT system just for strawberries after seeing those delicious looking berries! We definitely do not get enough strawberries out of our current dirt raised bed strawberry patch.

Love this setup such a peaceful place to sit and read while eating the berries lol

I didn't realize the strawberry towers needed to be switched on and off until well it was too late.

Hallo.
Learned a lot during this season. Questions: best levels of nitrate? Have a feeling that sometimes it was too low and the tomatoes didn´t had that sweetness and the leaves started to crumble. Usually I had 20-30 ppm. Too low in iron maybe? Hard to measure that.
Next summer I´ll exceed the bio filter and strawberry pipes and go to rainbow trout as The Engine. Going to a more sensitive fish, what to expect?

No more than 20-21C ?
Problems with stress related diseases?
How do I prevent stress?
Cover over the pond?
Cover the whole pond or just a part?
Can I "train" the trout to be more resistance?
Better "tribes"? (by selection? studies on the subject?)
Oxygen?
Too much oxygen?
Food?
Alive food?
Can I farm the food: bait fish?
Earth worms?
Iron and trout, no problems?

Have the winter to study. Where do I found books and studies in the subject "Farming rainbow trout"? In April I´ll have a 100 2hg trout arriving. Somebody told me, I could easily have 500 in my 13m3 system. Hmmm. Exciting

Beautiful set up! I imagine the lack of sweetness would have more to do with tomato variety, amount of direct sunlight or maybe phosphorous or potassium as nitrates are more associated with green growth.

As far as I know trout are indeed best kept below 21ºC ish. You could cover the pond, might keep temps lower and reduce algal growth? Not sure about "training", either they'll do well in the environment you give them or they wont. I don't think you can ever have too much oxygen, trout require plenty of it! You could supplement pellet food with earthworms/compost worms, flying insects (you can make a trap with a light), you could raise bait fish in a seperate aquarium, scuds AKA gammarus pulex is another interesting option and a staple of the trout's natural diet. I don't think there should be problems with iron... I know rivers in in northern spain which have wild trout, and the earth round there is orange/red and the tap water even tastes like iron, but that would be a different trout species, not rainbow. I think trout are happiest in flowing water, so the faster you can get the flow without compromising sediment removal and filtration etc the better.

I don't know any books, but here's a pdf with some info if you haven't come accross it already:

http://www.fao.org/3/a-i2125e.pdf

I'm sure some people with some first hand exp will chime in with some more specific tips and advice!

Sounds like you had a good first season. I've run trout here in northern New Mexico for two years.
I recently added a wave maker to give the trout current to swim against.

It seems they really do want more water movement.

I may add another wave maker as I have a irregular shape tank. I need to figure where to put one to move the water around in some kind of pattern.
How many liters is your fish tank, I forget?
I doubled the amount of Brook trout in my system which means a doubling of fish food, which is what feeds the bacteria.
I was always after fish with my system so I do not have the large quantity of media you have, creating a different situation for us.
Yes water needs to be cold for trout. I'd get them before Winter sets in. The hatchery has the fingerlings in well water at 55F which is 12C. I have never got my water that cold. There is a range they can tolerate I now know. Warm water indeed stresses the fish. Keeping the water cold and moving is the best way to not stress them. I know my thread is long, but I have recently referenced scientific papers on trout disease. @Scotty435 has been a great help in keeping me going in the proper direction, although he probably is scoffing at my decision to double my fish load without increasing my biofiltration. I'm working on this issue now
As I said I love seeing our fish which live just outside our living room french doors. I have a 1/4 of the pond covered with a boardwalk. The fish spend all the daylight hours in the light. I finally got tomatoes to cover the pond from direct sun light. This is how I can keep the fish water from getting warm during the Summer.
Nitrates should be stable at 20 ppm for plants. If it goes a little higher (40 ppm) that's all right too. How often do you measure the water parameters?
A quick search for trout farming books brought up the teachers guide http://www.aces.edu/dept/fisheries/education/documents/Species_Module_Trout.pdf

Thanks again for info! Boss, my system runs 13m3(about 3500 USG) of water.

Planning next season:

If I´m going to start a E/F system next spring and being a beginner, how to do that the best?

*Bell siphon or a U siphon?
*No less then 10" of growing media?
*Pebbles/gravels, volcanic or Leca?
*Cycles?
*Pump running the whole time or cut a few minutes after the siphone cycle started?
*Cut/drilled pipe the whole length of the bottom grow bed?
*Earthworms or no?(rotten worms in my DWC?)
Asking because looking around in this forum, there are so many good ideas pointing in all kind of directions, so I´m happy if somebody can give me a sum up, the basic thoughts or where to find that in this forum.

Anyone tried mixing charcoal in the growing beds? Said to work great.

The question about too much oxygen: Koicarp can actually get too much oxygen causing them problems with the swim bladder. Having an airlift, air hoses in the DWC and a big spindrifter in the system makes me a little worried to saturate the water too much. No worries?

I'd have had to add a separate pump for the towers to use a timer. One thing I considered was adding a solenoid to the water flow to the towers, but there is so much fine crap in the water I thought I'd be cleaning the valve often, I need low maintenance.

Hi guys.
Hope you all have had a good summer. Mine has been both good and bad. Still have trouble with my MB-filters, I think. Or something unknown in the tap water. Or? Some of my carps have wounds, so called carp ulcers. A reddish infection under neath the scales, that eventually form a wound with loss of scales and a bad infektion. Some had mouth rot too. Tried to heal them with a iodine and liquid propolis, fish patch. 2 dead carps and 6 recovered or healing wounds.
The tap water is really clean, TDS 80-90. Soft, soft. A mix between lake water and ground water. No chlorine, just big UVCs at the source. Ph 7,6. Perfect drinking water, but is it a good aquaponic water. PH too high, but after a month, down to 6,9-7. Better to my iron. Normal pond have, from time to time some ammonia, nitrite no readings and 30-40 ppm nitrate. Iron, epsom and sometimes I use a alga solution to boost the system(very low quantities). Flush the channels and pipes, several times during summer.
I think that the soft water, with not to many minerals, is slowing down the bacteria growth in my MB(300L of K3) and that causes the ammonia. That's the only thing I can see, causes the problems. But shouldn't they withstand some levels of ammonia? After feeding etc? Or maybe the rafts leaking something(styrofoam)? Or maybe the green house paint? Some people say it's too high levels of bacteria, bad ones. You guys who have growing beds and sedimentation in those, do you have troubles with "bad bacteria"? Sounds strange. Help needed! Basalt? Boost with minerals? Different rafts and paint?
Elias