Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Fish tank volume planned : from 500 liters to 1000 liters
Volume of growbed: 1000 dm3
area of growbed: 2 square meters
Depth: 50 cm

Planned veggies:
-Lettuces
-Sweet potatoes
-Mint
-"Pimentão" (Capsicum annuum)
-(there's some missing, I'll update later)

Planned animals:
Louisiana Red Crayfish

Notes:
-Composting earthworms will be added
-Carnivourous plants will be added next to other plants to prevent pests

Any advice?

Are you running the tank on a Timer?

Watch the mint it can get away from you and be hard to get rid of as it tends
to just pop up when not wanted.

i didn't even build yet, but it will have a timer, it will run water for 15 mins for hour

There are 2 things that I would never plant in my growbed again, they are mint and sweet potatoes.
If you know what a root bound pot gets like, then just imagine a root bound growbed aaah!
As long as you know what to expect you can plan for its removal and be prepared. It depends what is the purpose of the excercise. They do a good job of using humungous amounts of water from the system too. You may be inclined to think you have a leak somewhere. Extremely fast growing, which is great if you steam the sweet potato tips for eating.

Sweet potato is ok if your keep it trimmed, but mint is a nightmare, even in a pot in a growbed, it escapes and tries to go everywhere

Faye did you get one of Joels growbeds rootbound? Well done I get the barrels a bit too full sometimes

Hmmm, mint sounds like a serious spreader...
oh well, there's a lot of other plants that I can use, so it's not a big deal.

btw, does any of you guys now a way of feeding crayfish?
I already had some crayfish i caught from a lagoon, I had some troubles feeding them because remais floated (i used a mix between fish food and food waste from dinner), any advices on keeping the food in bottom of the tank?

A little bit of research I done a little while back.
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=3706
They live on rice stubble on crawfish farms.
Understand animal densitys will not be very high with crustations so you are not going to produce a lot of nutes for your plants. May want to consider putting something like goldfish or other herbivore in with them which put off a lot ammonia.

If there were a tasty friendly fish that wouldn't harm the crayfish :\

Plant eating fish won't harm the crawfish but...Crawfish like fish
Tilapia if your water is warm enough is a good polyculture fish Pacu is another vegi-vore that I understand is edible. Goldie's I wouldn't consider edible but won't harm the crawfish. Give your crawfish plenty of hides and that may help sustain a higher number in your system. If your crawfish have enough forage food they may not harrass the fish that much.

Van, You plans look a lot like my current AP set up, though larger. I look forward to seeing photos of your system when you finally construct it! Good luck with construction.

Happy growing!

Does anyone know if pacu can be raised with crayfish?
Cuz I know both are tasty :b
I eager to built it, and if it is successful, i'm going to use aquaponics next year for my biology/chemistry project

I googled crayfish polyculture and mostly tilapia comes up. Seems Pacu have a habit if fin nipping which may mean you would end up with legless crawdads but I'm just guessing. The pacu I had in my aquarium didn't have this tendency. But that is what comes up with google. Try it if they behave let us know. If not feed em to da cat

I've never eaten tilapia before... i think

oh well gotta investigate a little more then

I'm not certain how true this is but I was once advised that carnivorous plants live in the wild in "no or very low nutrient soil" (thus their need for insects) I bought a venus fly trap and a pitcher plant and was told to never fertilize them, so they might prefer to live in separate containers rather in the nutrient rich GB.



-craig

Someone recently started a thread about carnivorous plants in AP... not sure what success they were having...

But I've found a lot of plants that supposedly shouldn't grow well in aquaponics... actually thrive...

Try it... and report how you go...