Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have a single beetroot in gravel - just throw in something that doesn't relate to mutilating the protein producing grain/greens fed chickens that nobody REALLY wants to decapitate.
Anyway the beetroot is only young at this stage.

Here is a Daikon radish I just pulled from my system.
I am growing in pea gravel, so no issues with pressure...

The root was about 10", (the bottom 4" was a little knarly and was bent due to it growing in the corner of a halved barrel) but what you see is 6" of a very spicy radish!
Total of 38" from root tip to tallest leaf.

Hayden

very nice!

nice looking but why would you have issues with pressure?

i think there is concern that the root crops needed "softer" soil to form properly. Apparently heavy substrate can cause the root to mal-form, not that i have any problem with eating an ugly carrot! If i wanted pretty, conforming, tasteless veggies i'd go to the sumper market. LOL.

just refering to people mentioning possible issue with growing root crops in gravel.
Hayden

Hayden, supermarket food thing was not leveled at you, was just an attempt at humor

The only problem with a malformed root vegie is they're a bugger to peel!

E2

which is cool, as you can leave the peel on and not worry about pesticide residues

Hi,

We've found that carrots tend to fork whenever we plant them in new ground. They do better the second and subsequent years.

In my view, coco peat is the best media in which to plant root crops because it behaves like well-composted soil in that it gives easily around the root as it forms.

We've currently got carrot and beetroot seedlings in some trays of coco peat.

I would like to wake this thread up. I was going to create a Grow root vegies in AP thread then hey presto I found one

In my search I found that Outbackozzie seems to have been having good results


OBO I am hoping that you could update us and I am especially interested your thoughts regarding not getting too wet.

I also found that several others had been trialing perlite, vermiculite, coir peat, sand, hydrotron and gravel how have they gone?

Sweet potato was very nice to eat, onion is forming, ummm, onions right now, radishes are being eaten still - they are rather large, beetroot is starting to form.

By too wet I mean constantly flooding and draining all day, the onions struggled until I changed their siphon to a flood once, then stay drained type.

so would flooding once an hour be too much?

maybe root veggies would do well as a floating raft crop? avoid the gravel issue totally.

Its more a wetness issue timmy- they tend to absorb too much moisture and rot.

Once an hour is too much novaris - once a day if that. Trickle feed would be the best, but pipe blocking issues abound.