Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi all,

Can't say ive tried AP to dirt (yet) - but I have great sucess raising my seedlings in egg cartons (cut into 12 individual cups) with a perlite/vermiculite mix/coir mix.

When ready to plant out, I soak in water and tear the bottom off and stick it in the ground. The rest of the carton says for a couple months before breaking down, plus you dont retrict growth or expose roots when transplanting.

If the egg carton was still intact in AP, the theory could work transplanting into dirt - so long as maintained the moisture. An inverted coke bottle with a 2mm hole to drip water out would do the trick?

You could run a wick up through the bottom of the egg carton if you were concerned about it getting too soggy...

I recently pulled a bunch of pansies out of my media bed and planted them in pots. They survived fine. Of course, they weren't seedlings . . .

Autumn last year (northern hemisphere) I have sown cauliflower in my AP greenhouse system for transplant to a no greenhouse soil garden in spring this year. As a test I took out 1 seedling a couple of weeks ago and placed it in a big pot with normal soil outside of the greenhouse, no hardening of the seedling done. The leafs were hanging a couple of days but it recovered. No growth yet but it is still standing upright. With warm weather the leafs will go down again.

So I took out the remaining seedlings and planted them all in the soil garden last weekend. All are still strugling a bit, but none have died so far yet. Slug attacked a bit already off course. The soil has been pretty wet due to rain. We will see how they will do, so far it seems doable to transplant from AP. Cauliflower anyway.

Good luck!

Thats promising, larger plants are much harder to transplant.

Well those i transplanted the other week in the middle of the day which i thought would die because of the heat, most actually survived, i lost about 1/3 of the lettuces and 1/4 of the Broccs and Colies. They came from the cups with vermiculite soaking in AP water and straight into fresh organic dirt in the middle of the hot day. Worst possible circumstances yet a good result considering.