Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Imagine modeling clay with fist-sized rocks and black gravel throughout. That's what we have here.

Ordered the 15' x 10' liner for the sump (shipping was only $10 more than picking it up at the store) and the inverter from Harbor Freight today! My palms feel like they are bruised today from the shovel.

I'm still trying to find an excuse to buy a backhoe. A nice large pond in the backyard sounds good as long as I don't have to manualy dig it.

DD, Where are you buying your pond liner and how much are you paying?

Duff, I just rented a backhoe, but Im now convinced that if I owned one I could make my place perfect. It might be cheaper to make payments on one than to keep renting them.

http://www.webbsonline.com/catalog/liner/index.html

We are going to get city sewer sometime this year which means the sand mound will have to go. We have a 1000 gallon tank and two 500 gallon tanks for the sand mound. There will be a lot of heavy lifting for that process. I guess you can keep them in the ground as long as they are filled up. Maybe I can use them, but I doubt I'll try and they'll probably just get hauled away...

Today's weather is very miserable, cold and wet, good day for a nap or two. Last weekend the sump hole was finished, and I made a frame for the liner. Today the frame was screwed together and hopefully the weather will be better to put it in. Wood is danged expensive and threw the budget off. I thought afterwards that it would have been cheaper to use stacked blocks but I haven't had good luck making straight walls with them and I was concerned about the weight of the dirt pushing the blocks in. The frame will have plywood screwed on and plastic attached to it. I'm planning on driving nails though some short studs into the garage wall and screwing the frame to them for more support.

Mad props again to Nico and also to our neighbor Dawn who let us borrow a mattock and did some digging herself (she wants more tomatoes like last year).

Stupid rain, still waiting for the hole to dry out.

On the plus side the grass is now green. Spring is here!

Was able to get the sump put together and the pond liner loosely in there Sunday afternoon before the crappy weather came back today.

I used drywall to line the bottom, as I have a ton of it to throw away and it fits exactly in the hole. I tried to layer it up to make a kind of sloped bottom. The wood and drywall are covered in plastic.

I'm going to study TC's pond liner folding thread and try to get some furring strips to secure it properly maybe this weekend.

Looking pretty good.

OK so the liner is folded over (not very neatly) and it's holding water now. The mosquitoes are already dipping into it. I think the next step is to put the 180 gallon tub full of gravel on the end as a biofilter and get things cycling. It's going to be awhile before the gravel patio will be ready, lots of dirt moving and I'm not sure where the gravel load will come from or how much it will cost.

Yay Edit Button!

I have used mosquito dunks to keep mosquitoes at bay till I got fish into a system. I can say for definite that they don't seem to hurt frogs at all bassed on the frogs that used to live in my hydroponic tank with the mosquito dunks. I've had 4 fish in the duckweed system with two mosquito dunks and no floating tilapia. The catfish went into a system that had mosquito dunks in it before I got them.

Keep up the good work!

How bout that, a temporary edit button.

Good to see you getting down and dirty DD...

Thanks I might try them TC

Ruperto I'm just glad some of the dirt pile was redistributed a bit from backfilling the area. Too much ugly dirt piles around. It looks like more will be used up to build up the patio area. That part will likely take a bit of time as things are going to be busy around here for the next couple months.

I'm slowly learning that as long as your system volume is more than last year and you get plants started earlier than last year then it's all good.

Edit: I put a couple concrete blocks in the pond as the dogs were throwing a ball into it and I thought they could easily drown if they jumped in as the sides are flat. Will be putting together some kind of screen or trellis too.

Your dogs can't swim then? Need to get ones with some legs!