Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Yup, another spike today.

That too the feed was really light today (I also ran out of feed.) It must be the accumulation of previous feeds' ammonia.

I did find something funny at 6pm (now its 8:30 pm here) ... the fish were not frolicking about. I thought goldfish can sometimes just be plain tired of swimming around sometimes, because of their fancy tails and all that.
Oh now two of them were at the top breathing from the surface. ( With mouth just above surface.)

That explains the plant stall.
Any ammonia will stop the nitrobacter from working hard, and the ammonia conversion will stop at the nitrite stage (mostly that must be the spike now), with no one to convert it to nitrates.

I got too excited seeing the mint pick-up and must have fed a little too much(no, not 'too much' just 'a little too much') in the hopes of getting more and more nitrates.

The next time the plants stall I'm not going to feed more. I'm actually going to stop feeding and watch. Then after things settle maybe I can resume feeding.

Hmmm.. still a long way to go till my system becomes STABLE. But maybe even eventually I can't expect too much stability with a small growbed : fishtank volume ratio.
Otherwise you need a much lower stocking density. (which I don't have I think - I need more fish for more plants.)
GREED hehe. More More MORE... just kidding .

A big GB:FT ratio goes a LONG way in making things a breeze (=STABLE).

Hey its not bad though considering:

Its only 13 days since I bought 4 more goldfish to make it total 7.
Its only 11 days since the old pump died.
Its only 10 days since I replaced it with a new pump.
Its only 5 days since I did a 60% water change.
Its only around 5 days since the first spike.
Its only 3 days since the second spike.

(We have a third spike today.)

I guess I'm the one who's impatient!

By the way, writing about your system and things not only helps others, it also gives you a free log! I never have a sense of time (at least not a uniform sense of time - it flies when I'm excited, and looking back it feel several weeks have passed when only a few exciting days have passed.)

UPDATE:
The drain hole from the growbed was blocked by a small one-of-the-plants'-seed-pod-covering which I just unblocked.

So the real cause of this third spike could be this also but we cannot say for sure. It could only have be blocked for 3 hours at most before I noticed it just now.

The real cause could quite be a slight overfeeding too.

+1 for excitedly overfeeding

Instead of cooking the lentils and seeds how about sprouting them?

Oh great idea. I knew this, but needed to be remainded.

They have a LOT more nutrition when sprouted I heard.
( I can also make a snack for myself.)

Spike update, this is next day, midday:
The spike is vastly quite gone. No feeding at all has been done. I saw lots of goldfish poop NOW.(not much during the spike.) So they are eating. They have been feeding by scavenging and on the algae.
I found another indicator for spikes : I have 2 or 3 handfuls of gravel on one edge of the goldfish tub. The mulm accumulates there. The mulm accumulates and reaches a visibly white appearance when there is a spike, as the goldfish are not scavenging. After the spike, I always notice the gravel is really clean as they resume scavenging.

(The gravel is cleaner now. The goldfish also have pooped nicely after eating the mulm / algae (I did not feed at all).

Earthworm update : I went to dig earthworms outside my house. In a hard area, I found it hard to dig and gave up. There was another soft area where recent planting had been done. When I dug there I found around 10 earthworms in a square foot, within a depth of 6 inches.!

Most of them are 2 inches long. One of them is BIG, 5 inches long (and correspondingly fat).

I put 4 2-inch earthworms in the growbed and they slid into the dark moist depths.

With the other ones, I am going to start a micro worm tea making compost thing and I am reading about it on the web and some pages in the forum.

The species - by their appearance they are mostly red wigglers (Eisenia fetida) from this page

To other newbies reading : there is also a thread about worm tea in this forum here.

Or maybe the worms are Lumbricus rubellus but I don't care right now (later I will google)

Don't beieve the hype,,,just ask a few Aussie farmers that fell for the hydroponics fodder trick.

Sprout,,,seed add water MRACLE ( if it seems like bull poo, looks like bull poo , then most likely it IS bull-poo)

Yeah I wondered how it could be so... but I reasoned that maybe the process of germination makes some enzymes act on things and stuff. I thought, maybe, germination would release locked up stored food in a better form that might help the plant grow, that might be good for us if we ate it.

All wild guesses, I don't know.

Oh yeah my guesses seem to be true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprouting#Nutritional_information

Of course wikipedia may not be considered perfectly credible, but its ok. It doesn't matter much now... I like the sprouted taste better so I'll do it whether its more nutritive or not. . Anyway. it makes it soft so I don't have to do steaming/boiling which may destroy some vitamins or whatever.

PS: I didn't just now, write the nutrition section in wikipedia by the way. I don't have any wikipedia account. hehe

There are ants on the gravel. Will they setup a nest in the gravel? It floods every 20 minutes now (drain for 10 min, 'dry' for 10 min, total 20 minutes).

First the ants came farming aphids on a plant but it didn't bother me much. The other plants were left alone.
Now there were more ants on the cool parts of the growbed, and I'm not sure if they came just to farm aphids or to shift their home into the growbed!

The mint has been growing quite fast for the last three days ( a new pair of tiny leaves peeking out from the middle of two older ones, almost every 1.5 days or so, with the previous 'new leaf' now becoming larger.

To me it looks like the other plants are going to start soon.

The nitrates seem to be increasing steadily. (I guess this, by the fact that I am feeding steadily now and mint growth is steadily becoming faster and other plants seem on the verge of picking up.)

But the goldfish don't look too happy. (Not moving much someimes and having bouts of not-being-interested-to-eat.)
The spikes must be oscillating. The system is not stable yet.

All I have to do now, is NOT do anything much - PATIENCE (I thank you for the remainder.)

I had been out of town for 3 days, and the growth has been great, including the tomatoes.

Before I left there was a spike, and a fish death (one goldfish . Now six left. ). I am sure when I start feeding now spikes will again keep coming and going, so I have already decided to add a growbed or two.


Another thing - when I went out of town I also visited my grandmothers village from where I got a handful (maybe 50 ? ) red wrigglers (eiseina fetida) from composting cow dung. This will add to my 10 earthworms already in my newly started vermi-compost experiment.(1 week old).

I am quite happy now with the whole situation . My next post will hopefully be about a newly added growbed.