Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

The farm used to be a strawberry farm before my inlaws bought it. This room was the lunch room for the workers and is part of a big shed that used to be the packing shed. Now I call it my vegie room. The rest of the shed will have my poly aquaculture tanks. The windows face the North and I'm putting clear sheeting on the roof. This pic shows the 5 grow beds in the making. One growbed has vegies in it and I'm using the sump tank underneith as my fish tank for the time being until I get further tanks online. Since this photo I now have 3 growbeds with vegies.

Welcome Shane, keep the pics coming

2 more pics taken earlier

Niice

Plenty of aeration happening there.

nice, whats the plant in the foreground?

Looking great! I would not mind having a room like that to potter around in .. buuuuttt, the somewhat open water (partially covered) makes me uneasy - call it a character flaw

Nice Shane and gooday from Narrogin

Looking good Shane,
Your gonna make alot of us envious with a dedicated "vegie room"
Cheers

Thanks people

The vegies in the pics are tomatoes on the trelis and there are egg plants close up. The other plants are just seedlings and you can't see them.

The larger plants here were started off in a hydroponic experiment and then I moved them into the grow bed. Haven't really grown since.

The mesh over the fish tank was holding some pot plants. I didn't remove it before the photo.

I totally understand having small kids around large amounts of water. I will have to address this. Something I had not thought of.

So here is an update of where I'm at with the AP.
At the end of winter I had some plants go very well and some go very bad. Being in a glass house situation I found that in spring the winter vegies got too hot and went to seed. Now in mid summer I have the shed fully open to let the heat out but still gets very warm. Got to 43 degrees one day. So the summer vegies are growing well but still having problems. The tomatoes have lots of growth but have either no flowers or the flowers are not opening up and then dying off. Cucumbers are flowering but also die off. Zuccinnis don't flower and now have stopped growing. I think most of the problem is I have sprayed seasol on the foliage a couple of times and have burnt the leaves on some plants. The 9 Trout are still happy in a 3000L tank with 3 grow beds of 400L.The fish tank water got to 23 degrees on the hottest day we've had and usually sits at 21 degrees. I have 30 yabbies in the sump/drain tank where the water gets pumped back to the fish.

The fish water PH 7.5
Nitrite .25
Nitate 40
Ammonia .25

I have put some shade cloth on the roof so that the sun doesn't heat the growbeds and in turn doesn't heat the water. I have the fish at the cooler part of the shed. I have a large pump so I can expand further. But for the moment I have a lot of the water going back into the fish tank. The sump pump has a float switch and airates the fish water as it pumps back. I also have 2 little pond pumps going 24/7 just for extra airation and also runs through sea shells for neutral PH.

Here are some more pics, the first photo is of the return line from the sump and the next two are photos of extra water going back into the fish tank when irrigating the vegies.

Hey, that is a cool looking system, look forward to seeing how it all works out for you...

good to see you are still out there. Really warm temps will keep tomato plants from setting fruit. It is winter here and I've sometimes been keeping the greenhouse sealed up on warm days to help bring the water temp back up and by doing that it gets really hot in the greenhouse which has done in most of the cool weather crops in my AP system as well as defeating the tomato plants.

Next winter, I'll stick with only fish that can handle cool weather so that the plants can do better. Then I only need to seal up the greenhouse for the freeze warning nights.

Shade cloth a definite must for hot summer even if no enclosure In summer my system is uncovered.