Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Test today is looking good:

Put in about 3 handfulls of shell grit, plus I now have a Cuttle Bone floating in the water (gave it a light scrape when I added it).

This has been a great little system. We have harvested Bok Choi, heaps of Lettuce and Tomatoes.

The Silver Perch was moved to a bigger body of water today as the water temperature of the pond tends to track ambient temp due to its small size and exposure. Even the goldies are looking dopey at the moment. I may put a small heater in to make their life a little more bearable and try to get more tomatoes to ripen, though goldfish are supposed to be able to handle near 0 C temps...the fluctuation might not be so nice...

yep fluctuations are the problem.

you have some unique stuff in there... thanks for sharing... erm it's November and the last post is may... are there any more updates or have you decided to stop this coz you've got another system?

Hi Jensilaedi,

My small system is still going strong, though I ran it without fish over winter because the temperature fluctuations are too hard on the fish and I don't want to heat it. I used a bit of Charlie Carp and Seasol to keep it ticking over.

It's just been restocked with some feeder fish and Comets, I prefer Shubunkins, but this year the price seems to have gone silly for Shubunkins?

Seedlings just coming up now - Tomatoes, Cabbages and others.

I grew some Barley and Water Cress over winter - Barley sprouted from my other system so I grew it out - it grew well.

The system has been faultless, the only issue I had was when I blasted one of the Jam jars with water from the hose which forced too much air into the tube and it lost its siphon (didn't notice the water flooding for a couple of hours...) - otherwise I think I cleared the clear pipe twice over the last 6 months or so, and that's about it. The siphon return through the pump has worked well. A very low cost system.

Myles.

Thanks for the quick update.

the NHO was one idea I lacked utterly until now and I'm happy to learn it. From learning about it, I also learned about different siphoning, overflowing actions and from there created my fourth AP dream plan (A more workable system btw.)
Some of these ideas also gave me the solutions that I've been looking for, for the cubbyAP for a long time.

Thank you so much for the inspiration....