Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have read a couple posts discussing organic additives to the systems to encourage plant growth but i was wondering is it specific to what you are growing or is there an AP standard. For example, are most people adding iron or calcium? how about the humic acid discussed by smoky mountain? He indicated that nitrogen and phosphorus are abundant but what about potassium?
also, i have been seeing little white spots on the foliage of my herbs (not the swiss chard or lettuce) but no bugs. I can only assume it is some sort of nutrient deficiency. will post picts if that can help at all.
as a side note, i have been getting great growth results just things don't have that full healthy green color (on cilantro and parsley mostly)
i would be very grateful for any help
thanks
g

Pics would help Mountainsky... and what's your pH??... trace elements are often locked out within certain pH ranges..

the pH is around 7.25-7.5. i will try to get some pics up as soon as possible.
also, all my other levels are fine. low nitrite, and ammonia.

what do most people add to their systems (if anything)?

I add chelated iron (liquid Bonide brand spray), calcium as crushed oyster shells.

I went looking for a trace mineral foliar spray at Walmart yesterday but no luck. I know AgWay has some.

My plants definitely needed iron, the green bean problems I had before seem to be better now with the new leaves after adding some to the water and also spraying them with the iron.

In my system #1 I was worried that a mineral spray that included copper, zinc, etc. had killed my goldfish (slowly over weeks), but now I think it was probably the cooling temperatures instead. But to be more careful I plan to only spray the plants and not add it to the water like before. HTH!

just to be clear, is the chelated iron a spray applied to the plants or added directly to the fish tank itself?

I've done it both ways, sprayed on the leaves and into the sump.

This may help with a few answershttp://www.hbci.com/~wenonah/min-def/list.htm

one of the mods might like to put a space between answers and http so that the link can be clicked on

here are some picts of what i'm dealing with. bugs? nutrients? light? whats causing this?
thanks
g

Definitely a deficiency.... I'd go for a general all purpose foliar feed... like maxicrop

http://www.maxicrop.com/pages/products_main.html

May try to foliar feed some epsom salts to them. Calcium or Mg def maybe...

+1 for maxicrop, add enough to your tank to turn the water a *very* light brown (should still be see through).

i'll check out the maxicrop.
thanks for the help
g

noticed a lot of yelloing on the leaves on my sweet potatoes and capciums thought yup i need some chelated Iron that will sort it out.

so off to the local murchants of Much ( the B store) saw that the Chelated Iron was $20 for 500g and there was this other Iron additive which was $8 or so ... i was in hurry so i just grabbed the cheap one and when i got home i realised what i had bought was actualy Iron Sulphate, is this the same as Chelated Iron?

im a bit worried to add it as its got poison written across the top of the bottle, but i cant see any warnings for aquatic life on the lable

Any thoughts ?
Cheers
Pete

Iron Sulfate is not chelated Iron. However, I've used the liquid Iron Sulfate on plants in my system when I could not find the chelated Iron. It is probably better to use it as a foliar spray (spray in the evening so as not to burn the plants though.) chelated iron is more available at higher pH while the iron sulfate is more likely to be unavailable to the plants if the pH is up in an appropriate range for most AP systems.

Those pictures don't really look like Iron Def to me. Potassium is probably needed more in this case. Maxicrop or maxicrop with Iron are what you want. Make sure the maxicrop you get doesn't have added Nitrogen though. The maxicrop you want probably has about 0.1 of Nitrogen.