Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I was informed last year that I wouldn't be able to grow trout through the summer in Margaret River. I picked up my trout from Pemberton as fingerlings in October last year and now it is October again and I have a tank full of very active trout and a lot of celery and butter lettuce.

I think I owe the success to having the system covered over by two layers of shade cloth suspended above to keep out the sun.

Triploids are absolutely delicious and I mostly cook them in a Chineese bamboo steamer.

I feed them about every three or four days. I decided very quickly that as the triploids don't breed then I didn't need to grow them at a rapid rate. After all, how many fish can one family eat. Being triploids means that they can keep growing and not become egg bound and so keep on living into the next Year and this means that I don't need to restock again this year if I don't want to. So far I have only fed my hundreds of fish with just less than one twenty kilo bag of food.

Somehow the fish seem to find enough other food to survive on: perhaps, frogs and their eggs and flying insects are enough for gradual growth.

I have concluded that in my case it isn't necessary to feed the fish every day and this allows my large four point five meter diameter tank to remain free of nitrates and ammonias.

where are the photos trev

A few people get through summers with Trout, however, we all say not to do it unless you have a very large dam, because it only takes a freak set of days of 35++ and you WILL loose the fish, especially larger ones.

Just because you got through last summer, does not mean you will get through this one.

What was your warmest water temps?

Ivan and Eagle have grown their Trout all year in Margaret River for the last few years without a problem and I know of plenty of others around Donnybrook, Bridgetown and Busselton areas that do like wise. Perth on the other hand is a different story with summer temps often above 40C where as south of Bunbury it rarely gets that hot.
Fish will grow depending on the space they have and the amount of food they get. You can have a 3 year old Trout that is barely 6 inches long or one that weighs over 10lb depending on the conditions its grown in. The thing with rainbow trout is that they are relatively short lived so even though you are stunting their growth its unlikely they will live longer than 3 or 4 years where as Silver Perch can live for over 20 years!!

I know of one person in donnybrook who has a small aquaculture system that lost a whole heap of Trout over xmas a few years back.

As I said, it is not reccomended unless you have a proper deep water setup.

Yeah the smaller systems with the lower water volume always heat up the quickest so you are much more likely to have problems. There is definately no guarantee that anybody will get there fish thru a summer, even the hatcheries in Pemberton have had times lost huge numbers of fish due to high water temps and they have even got cooling towers!

no photos as I would have to catch the trout. They don't photograph well in my dark tank.
I think doubling the density of the shade cloth and feeding them just every three days has helped this year.

What size is your tank ??

4.5meters diameter and the water is 40 centimeters deep.

Hi Trevor,
Sorry aboutt he quick chat the other day at the hardware.
I was kind of in a rush ... I will tell you more soon.
Good to see you had success with the trout!
Another one bitten by the bug.

No worries Ivan,
now would seem the time to get more trout.

This year I have suspended one shade cloth above another to help cut out the early morning and late afternoon summer sun. This was enough to stop the algae from growing.