Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Excellent! I was concerned that your readings might be from the juice, but you have ruled that out very nicely.

Actually it could be the Gogo Juice - check this out and see what you think...

Lucky you haven't got any fish in there....

I know ...what do I do with that? throw plants in ASAP? change water? Or will it go down by itself?

What you don't have plants in? Yeah, get them in, they will love it...

Well... weve got about 9 beds of duckweed which is probably helping, as well as a heap of baby seedlings - and 2 orange trees... but there are still lots of empty beds to fill... think a trip to the bunnings seedling section is getting pretty urgent tho!

Still have about 50 yabbies and 100 baby minnows all active and eating well... and 5 REALLY fat goldfish (have read barra food makes them obese so have changed their feed back to goldfish food which might help!)

The nitrites would be what would worry them not the nitrates - is that right? So once the Ni goes down to 0, I will spike the ammonia again and see how quick it goes back down.

Go to a good nursery... not Bunnings...

yes the nitrites and ammonia are the dangerous things. (The fish and yabbies you mention are not in the system with the purple nitrites are they?)

Apparently duck weed feeds on ammonia directly rather than nitrate. So your duck weed mightn't be doing the job of regular plants.

Ahhhhh... in short... yes

Not sure if we lost any yet - hard to say with the minnows as we didnt count them just dumped the bucket in and hoped for the best... will have to do a head count of the yabbies when we can.

The Amm, and Ni were both back to zero and the Na at 10 for the last few days, and now the Amm is back up to 1 today, as hubby dumped the slurry of what was in the stocking (fish food hanging in the sump) into the FT... time will tell if that was wise or not.

.. todays readings... Amm - 1, Ni - 0, Na - 10... seems to be recovering faster each time. interesting gemmel... maybe thats why we didnt get that high an Amm reading but the Ni went off the chart?

PS Rupe, we have 4 choices here to buy seedlings from... 3 get them from the same buyers, and the 4th has none and isnt interested in getting more ATM... Plus with our gift voucher we only paid 15 for a heap of seedlings and 3 plants which we were happy with... so 18 out of 21 beds now have something growing in them... had to dig up one of the seedlings we thought was nearly dead to see whats going on... plant roots had doubled in length in 4 days... hubby is pretty impressed

Maybe, but more likely caused by fast-growing ammonia>nitrite bacteria (nitrosomonas) and slow growing nitrite>nitrate converting bacteria (nitrobacter). Ammonia gets converted fast into nitrite which just sits there. After a while the slow bacteria will catch up, but meantime you get a dangerous spike on nitrites. Glad to see both nasties are dropping.

Thanks hydro... makes sense
Im surprised everything dropped back to 0 so quickly!

... the whole process is pretty amazing when your experiencing it for the first time...

Im glad theres somewhere to go to chat with people who have gone through it before... it seems MUCH more reassuring that way

Thanks

At the beginning of the post there was the mention of kelp extract.

I'm wondering can you add kelp extract and ammonia at the very beginning of the cycling process
Thereby giving the plants at least a little something.

I currently have 8 dutch buckets with tomatoes and peppers and 4 tubes for NFT
they are currently running hydroponically (using general hydroponic solution)
I don't have any gravel grow beds at all. (not planning on having any)


If I now run these with the ammonia water for the cycling. What are the plants going to feed on ?

thus I was thinking adding a little kelp extract at least the plants will have something while the cycle starts

And comments or suggestions


Thanks in advance

Yes kelp extract like MaxCrop is helpful. I add it to my fish system regularly. Some use it for cycling a new system with fish.

If you do not have plan on grow beds what is acting as your biofilter? You will need something to convert the ammonia to nitrates.

Thanks dsjohn99

I have a solids Filter (Radial Flow) and a Bio Filter with K3 and K5 bio balls/media

Thanks again