Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I went to Singapore and Cambodia for 2 weeks. On return, 2 of my large fish were dead and had been for about a week. The other 6 big'uns are looking pretty shaky! The little guys are looking OK. Changed some water, ran it full time for 2 days without feeding, the big guys have all sorts of issues including tail being white and in tatters and still don't look healthy. Thinking I may just kill 'em off rather than risk infecting the others.

It's also D-Day for me, every ANZAC day weekend for the last two years has spelled mass die offs. So I'm all hands on deck, it's salted to 3ppt and I've got my ebarra doing it's aeration thing.

Fingers crossed.

No one was checking on it for you? I get scared about 4 days lol, glad I have the webcams to spy on it

Yeh my dad was checking it. But he's got no idea, so didn't even see the 2 big dead fish...

Incidently, I bought one of the webcams you talked about, hopefully I'll be building the underwater cam soon...

I get nervous after 4 hours lol

Well, nothing to report really. Things are going well, plants are growing reeaaaallllly sloowwww due to the cold. My water is sitting at roughly 4 or 5 degrees, and our max temps are only 10 or 11...

I took a quick video of the system here if you're interested.




I guess I made it through ANZAC day long weekend. I'm almost certain my previous years disasters were caused by good ol' over feeding. The trout were dying of O2 starvation caused by the breakdown of the food (which had turned into a fine silt and spread througout the entire system). That's my best guess given that I made it through this year and everything but my spray bar and feeding style is the same.

With your trout feeding so well, not sure why your plants arent doing much because there should be plenty of nitrates in there

Because it's cold. Days are reaching max temps or about 10, water temps are sitting at about 4. I can tell you know, plants don't grow well with cold feet.

Silver Perch also don't like the cold, just noticed today some have fin rot.

Hi Gemmel, the trout are looking good. I'm getting really slow growth too with not much sun and coooooollllld.

Should be better soon though!

You should still be right for some winter plants though I would have thought, even with those temps... Need some cabbages and broccoli...

Hey gemmell what feed do you have there?

I have small pellets as my trout food. Also i wish my water was that clean cant hardly see the trout in the IBC

4mm grobest at the moment.



Yeh I haven't got any broccoli in, though there is silver beet and kale in there, but it's still really slow.

Moved my (hardy as) fish which lasted through the summer to the school because they managed to kill all of theirs (they stuffed up the automated feeder and it dumped the entire lot into the tank).

Check 'em! I'm proud of these guys, and given the efforts I went to to keep them alive over the summer, I don't think I could have killed them anyway.





And a vid of them being free'd (ignore the idle chatter....)



The schools veg are doing way better than mine, I think partly because it's in a shade house (so less frost) and partly because it's sitting on a massive slab of concrete. Oh and partly because they don't have the same slater infestation that I have.


By the way, does anyone know where I can get Uniseals?

I know where you can get uniseals. Will pm you the details.

You can get rid of your slaters by flooding your growbed.. The little buggers tend to climb over all the plants so best done after a major harvest in a bed..

Yep, I've done it a few times already and they keep coming back - I need to clear out the entire bed first I think, there's always SOMETHING in there I want to keep, and the little critters get their escape.