Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

plants, quick lot's of plants. You need to grow lettuces and silverbeet, quick :-)

It's good for now... slow down the feeding, check your stocking levels, and put some heavy-feeding plants in there.

How old is the system?

As per above - add loads of plants.... Particularly heavy feeders. Is it too early for Tomatoes for you?

Worst case, stop feeding for a few days and do a small/partial water change... Throw the water onto see fruit trees or other growing areas in your garden. When I expanded my system recently, I used alot of the water on my Passionfruit and the change was incredible. We had very little growth, quite dark leaves... Added a few hundred litres of AP water to the area and the damned thing TRIPLED it's growth in 6 weeks! New leaves much healthier and we had a burst of flowers and fruit.

If it was a reading of high Am or Nitrites I'd do the water change post haste but not so bad for nitrates to be a bit high pending the age of the system as that adds another dimension... As everyone else said go nuts on the plants... Even if they're not spaced ideally, just to get something using up all those valuable nitrates

What volume is the FT ? How many fish ? What size grow bed & type plants ?



+1 to Cunningstunter - if small system use it on some pot plants or fruit trees and do a top up.
that will give an immediate response.

Med term (if it keeps occurring) - may need more plants or grow bed.

as others note ammonia and nitrites look OK.

Almost looks like a recently cycled system with Na ready to go to work!

The fact the OP has few posts, the user name and has posted very little info other than one pic makes me wonder if it's a newish system?

Some more pics and info would help ascertain the situation fully. I mean what if OP already had a shed load of plants for instance... Could change the advice.

OP - the forums love ze pictures!

You need to dilute your sample before testing to see what the level actually is, when it is off-scale.
Add 15ml of tap water to your 5ml sample, take 5ml of that and do your test.
Multiply the result by 4.

guys the system is over a year old. I have 10 tilapia and 6 gold fish. the tank is a 225 gal ibc tote. the grow bed is 4 foot by 8 foot and 16 inches deep. I have had the strawbeerys , chives and bell pepper plants for a while. got rid of the peppers and added the collards , musturds and broc. and cabbage. the fish hardly eat now and I only try to feed them once a day. I

I'll just recap and put this in different words. Might be some ideas you can use as well

Basically the nitrates are high and need to be used up as mentioned. The high nitrate levels will decline when the plants use more than the bacteria produce as they break down the fish waste. I think the plants you added should help since they are heavy nitrogen users. The nitrogen may continue to go up since it's still early in the season and the plant growth might be a little slow. At some point I'd expect it to decline but if the fish are large or eating a lot it might not.

If you find that the nitrates are still increasing - Adding another plant bed would give you more space to plant and would help use these nitrates. Adding a water plant like water hyacinth would also reduce the nitrogen but watch it because this plant is really good at growing and using up all the nutrients. I grow it in the summer and regularly remove some to compost so it doesn't use up all the nutrients. Try not to add any water snails when adding plants . For anyone living in warmer climates it may not be legal to use water hyacinths because this plant because it is very invasive.

Last of all as your grow bed fills with solids you may get more anaerobic mineralization happening and this will release some of the nitrogen as a gas into the atmosphere. There is always some of this going on, even in well aerated grow beds. Some other toxic gasses also get released in the anaerobic process so you probably don't want to encourage this process in your grow bed. It's good not to get too much solids buildup.