Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Ok, some critter has eaten off most all of my salad seedlings in a few of my beds!!!!!!! I have a few mouse traps and a rat trap that I'll set out.

I've planted some onions and Garlic in those beds now and re-planted seeds. A real bummer as I am now running low on salad greens just when I was hoping to start thinning the seedlings for salad.

Ack

Rats!!!

I had some eating my snow peas early on, then got a visit from one of these and no more rat problems..

Had a couple black garden snakes around for the longest time but haven't seen them in a while, perhaps it's been too cool lately for them.

Turning the compos last week we found a few baby rodents. Got rid of them but the parents are still around somewhere.

Set the traps this evening so hopefully I'll catch something other than lizards. I fear that the snakes around here tend to eat more bugs, lizards, and frogs than rodents. I might have to encourage the neighborhood cat to come hang out around the greenhouse at night as he seems to like chasing rodents. But I don't want to leave a rat trap around where a cat might get near it.

might sound gross, but chickens love baby rodents

I find the pool is great for mice. The water level in down so they can't get out when they try to get a drink. Then the silvers play with them for a while. I fish them out later. 4 or 5 so far. And I fish out the larger frogs that they can't eat because they are too big. But they do play with them for a while and try like hell.

eewwww. I just found a dead rat. Now I'm not saying ew because it is a dead rat or a rat. I'm saying eeeewwwww because I found it by smell!

Ok, so it's been cool here for several weeks so I let the feeders run empty and have been feeding by had lately to keep an eye on how much the fish are eating, been home anyway so I have the time. Well, the last few days I've noticed an odor around the fish tank (kinda like the smell when the poor quality food built up in a wet blob on the edge of the tilapia cage) so I did a little extra cleaning up with the hose around the cage yesterday and checking to make sure nothing was clogging up. Cleaned the pump trap and tested water quality. Wondering what the heck is going on this time.

Today, still noticing the lingering rotting odor I decided to pull the empty feeders out and take them apart to give em a good wash/cleaning before re-filling again.

Upon lifting the tilapia tank feeder out of it's crate/support cage, I discovered the source of the odor! A dead rat! I guess I might not need the rat trap set anymore but there might still be a mate out there somewhere. Well that explains the odor.

Now I need to get new augers for my feeders. In both feeders the augers have been chewed. About all I can guess is that the rat must have been in there chewing on the auger trying to get at the last few crumbs of feed when the timer turned the feeder on. The now jagged auger must have injured the rat quite baddly so all it could manage to do was fall out of the feed tube and perish in the milk crate.

This wasn't a huge New York City sewers kind of rat. It was just the somewhat larger than a big mouse kind of rat. Small enough to get it's head and upper body into the auger tube and chew on the plastic part of the auger.

Darn it! Went to the Autopetfeeder web site to try and order replacement parts but they don't list these kind of internal parts for sale on the website. Called the company and was waiting for a reply. They just called back to say, we do not sell replacement parts, you can buy a complete new base. Dang, that's $70 for a replacement base, probably plus shipping and I need two! All I want is the steel rod with the plastic screw molded around it.

Arg

Couldn't you form a new flute for the auger?
Hot glue can be moulded

I expect it might be possible to shape some bits to fill in for the chewed off portions but I would need a material that is either strong enough not to be abraded away by the food rubbing (and therefore getting eaten by the fish) or a material that if bits break off or grind of and the fish eat it, it won't hurt them.

Unless you want to use the old ones as rat traps. Reminds me of the large auto mouse trap I got. Wind it up and when the mouse goes through it drops them into a storage bin. Holds about 30 mice. If you squish em in.

Know anyone with a lathe. Turning one out of wood would be easy. Metal a little more work involved..

You found anything that likes to chomp on Moringa TC?
3 of mine that came up got their leaves eaten before had much of a chance......
Seems like they need to get to a certain strength to be OK... you find that? Did you plant seed or buy trees?
Have ordered a hundred seeds now!

let some guinea pigs run around-if your beds are off the the ground,rats are scared of them-really scared

no mouse problems here my cat takes care of them,

although she is looking at the little fish and i am sure licking her lips

My cats drink from the fish tank

I probably shouldn't release any guinea pigs in my yard though or I will probably find I am only providing food/entertainment for the neighborhood cat and if that isn't the case, I don't want to create a feral population of guinea pigs around here.

I think the feeders will still sort of work even with the chewed screws so I'm gonna just keep bugging the company regularly to make replacement parts available.