Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I was worried about high PH in my larger system. And was looking into adding stuff to pull it down. Now that the bacteria is going the PH has dropped by itself and I'm thinking I'll have to add something later to bring it up. It started in the 8's and is now 7.2.

Stephanie

Try peat, or aquarium wood as a buffer if you have to use something organic (will make the water discolour though). Pine trees kill most plants living under them, lot of theory's round why, used to be turning the soil acidic (and it does), or blocking out light. Terpenes are produced in reasonable quantities in pine sap (alleochemical) thats where turpentine originally came from.
Unless you have other things in the system, when cycled, ph should decrease (as Duff said). Try spraying the plants with a light foliar feed, should not harm the system.

Just because the pH of your tap water is at a particular # right out of the tap, that does not really represent the actual pH of your tap water. I suggest you take a sample of that tap water and put it in a bucket with an air stone overnight and check the pH again in the morning. If there is much dissolved CO2 in your tap water directly out of the tap, it can make the pH temporarily lower than it is really likely to be. When that CO2 outgases, you will see a more realistic pH.

My well water comes out the hose with a pH of 7. I could never understand why (back in my days of hydroponics) why I always had such a bad problem with my pH rising since I was adding water with a pH of 7. Well, I didn't know about letting it outgas and testing again to get a more realistic idea of the pH. After letting my well water sit and bubble for a bit, the pH is really about 8.

I'm not sure how safe pine needles will be for fish in the long run. You might be better off bringing the pH down by keeping the bacteria going with a steady supply of ammonia, urea or urine until a week before you actually get fish.

Yeah i'm gonna take the pine needles out I think and add urea or urine to it periodically for another two weeks. I'm going to have to put off getting fish anyway. The battery going out on my car and having to be replaced took them right out of the budget.

The ph has gone down to about 7.6 - 7.8, so that's worked out pretty well.

And I was really worried about gold fish since the water temp rarely goes below 76, so I got guppies instead. And they seem to be doing well so far. Probably going to have to get about 20 of them eventually but 5 should work for now. Hopefully they'll breed like rabits.

Actually, people have it backwards: rabbits breed like guppies......

Sorry for no update in a long time, I find that when i visit this forum i do more reading than typing.

We picked the first tomato yesterday! The plant has about 15 or 16 tomatoes other tomatoes on it.

I finally got a bigger heater in it and have been able to control the temperature a lot better at 82 F, which is ideal for guppy breeding according to wikipedia, and several of the females look pregnant. I only have 8 in there at the moment and i'm not sure about adding more until i see how the frys will do.

I bought some maxi-crop cause i thought it might help with the discolorization in the tomato leaves, they turned a dark purple/black in spots where they get the most sun but otherwise look fine. I made the mistake of adding a whole cape full to a gallon of water and then adding most of the gallon to the system and everything turned black.

And the ph still hasn't come down, still at about 8 or 8.2, and then when it rains it goes up even more.

Here's a new picture. So far we've gotten two tomatoes off the plant and they tasted sooo much better than the ones you get at the store. Well at least the second one did, I don't know about the first one. My fiance picked the first one and put it in an omelet while I was at work. I was sooo mad.

We've been having alot of fun with the aquarium part of the set up if you couldn't tell.

The ph is still high.

The first tomato died, I think it was from wilt, we'd gotten about 15 tomatoes off of it. I'm not sure if that's a good return or not, at the end the tomatoes were pretty small.

I got some chive and cilantro starting to sprout in the second pot, and brought home another tomato plant from the farmer's market the other day, a seedling that had been raised organically so far.

The light colored plastic was a bad idea. When I was cleaning out the pot from the dead tomato plant I found out that there was a solid wall of moss growing along the two sides that got the most sun. So the pots are now wrapped with the shiny insulation stuff. and hopefully that'll help keep the heat down a little has we start getting closer to summer.

And I have about 20 baby guppies swimming around in there as well. I'm sure this aquarium will be overcrowded soon.

Tomato is already twice the size and starting to flower.
The thyme sprouted then died,
The chives sprouted and some withered up and died and others are still growing.
The cilantro is doing well but was the slowest to sprout.

everything that started from seeds is dead never sprouted. the tomato plant is freaking tough, it's got this cycle of dying, then i trim off dead parts then it comes back for a little while. Hasn't produced any fruit at this point. I should rip it out but at this point in the summer i really don't want to replace it with anything else since it's pretty hot.

I put some basil and chives in the other pot that i bought from a nursery. Plants seems to better than seeds for me. The basil plant is now larger than the tomato plant and the base of the stem is starting to turn woody. The chives are a little stunted, i trimmed a bunch off right before a major heat spell and they haven't came back completely.

And in even better news my fiance and I are buying a house, so soon my balcony system will be a real backyard system.

Congrats on buying the house!

So, the next system will be 10,000 gallons, aka "swimming pool"?

Too bad about seeds failing. Sprouting, then dying off might be caused by lack of nitrates or damping-off from not enough drain time. Same for the tomato and chive symptoms. I'd bet on lack of nutrients: tomatoes are real hogs.

Yeah my nitrates pretty much stay at 0, and with the heat the way it's been I've been hesitant to add too many more fish. I have ice containers that i drop in the tank during the day but the temp is still at around 90.

Hi Stephanie!

How much evaporation are you getting, how often does it need more water and about how much do you have to add to it? When I had a small system on our deck it used water a lot, and the water was more hot than warm sometimes depending on the sunshine.

With your low humidity, a fan blowing on the surface of your fish tank might be far more effective than ice. Probably cheaper and easier as well.