Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi - I actually joined here last summer but am just now getting to really dive into this forum. I've done a heap of reading the last week or two on here, trying to learn all I can. I also just ordered a DVD from this website (Murray?) on getting started. My husband and I watched the IBC video last summer and printed off the booklet. This month I printed the first copy of the magazine on this website and we're going to order the back issues and subscribe to the magazine. And, of course, keep reading this forum and taking notes as much as we can.

We have a 1,000 gallon fiberglass tank we want to use for the FT. We are building a 12X20 enclosed porch on the east side of our mobile home. We want to dig a hole in the ground to lower the FT tank (a foot or two - it's 5' tall) and then build the porch floor around the tank. That will put the weight of the FT on the ground instead of the floor. We'll insulate the tank and then build a plywood box to support the sides. The sides will then be supported by the porch floor around it, too. It has a drain pipe in one end so it can be drained easily (hopefully to help remove solids on the bottom, too). Hubby says we can run a pipe from that drain out to the dirt garden. Do we need to coat the inside of this tank with something or is it ok like it is? Being under/in the porch like this should help keep the water temps in the tank more stable (cool in the summer and warm in the winter) and rain cannot get into the hole that the tank will be sitting in. I want to incorporate a small waterfall for the FT for aeration and for enjoyment.

Fish in the tank - want to go with something that's indigenous to our area (they tend to thrive better). We have a large lake close to us and there is bass, sun perch, catfish, etc. They have bass tounaments there. I don't like catfish but I do like the bass and perch. The bass eat the perch, though, if I remember correctly. Do bass do well in an AP? We could go fishing on the lake but we don't have TIME. With a tank this large, can we get the fish to reproduce on their own if they aren't overcrowded? We do have some ponds that we can put brood fish in (one has catfish in it already - unless they all died this winter). The ponds can go dry on us when it gets bad droughts (like the one last year). That's why we like the FT idea in the house. There is a place about 2 hours from us that raises and sells fish commercially - we're looking at getting fish from them when we are ready to get started but I would rather not have to keep buying fish if we can help it.

The GB's will go along the south and east side of the porch (minus a door to the outside on the one side of the south wall). We have some big old aluminum windows (took them out of the mobile home) that we will put on those walls. When it's warm, we can open the windows. We're going to put a clear roof on the south end of the porch and solid roof the rest of the way. When it's too hot, we'll cover the clear roof with aluminet - we even use this on our mobile home roof to reflect heat away. It's for greenhouses. We have more trouble with getting too warm than being too cold. This porch will have a patio door on the west wall (on the trailer - it's already there). I have a wood stove in that room and when it's cold we can open the patio door to let the heat go into the porch if we need to. The windows don't have screens and I'm thinking that we can open them when it is warm enough to allow pollinators/bugs into the porch.

Since we're dealing with a lot of weight with this kind of thing, we're looking at using one of our telephone poles (bought them) to cut the supports for the porch (the legs). They are treated and will last a long time and are probably overkill but we have them and I'd rather know that the porch floor is really supported. The floor will be treated plywood. We have some large Rubbermaid stock tanks that we can also use (sump? Nursery? ??). The GB's - I thought about just building beds along the walls with lumber and painting them with fish safe apoxy (saw that on one of the member's threads) but I'm also liking the blue plastic barrels cut in half. We do have access to all the free IBC's we can haul off. We'll probably start with one of those for learning as we're building the porch. My husband is one of those guys who is very handy with his hands (mechanic, carpenter, farmer, etc.). I'm the one who comes up with the wacky ideas, he says, "Nope, that won't work." and then he makes it work for me anyway.

I want to incorporate a worm farm on the porch (the room with the patio door is my kitchen so I can throw kitchen scraps to them easy). And a BSF box out by the chicken pen. We want to keep the feeding of the fish as natural as possible (not crazy about pelleted fish feed, not to speak of having to pay for it) so we're researching things like duckweed (which we found out is all over our state wild). I'd like to know if we can utilize manure tea (from goats) as a spray on the plants in the AP - can that hurt the fish?

Any dead/extra fish we have different ways to use - fertilizer in the garden; barn cats and farm dogs; chickens; BSF bin; etc.

Goals - to keep this as simple of an operation as possible. We own a business and run this farm and we don't need something else to add to the work load if we can help it. We need this to be very basic, nothing fancy. We also have an issue with keeping elec. going for a pump - we are at the end of the power lines and it is not unusual for our power to go off on a regular basis. We have a generator but we don't like to run it if we can help it and to keep a pump going 24 hours a day w/gennie is not practicle. We've had times where we were iced in for days with no power. We are looking at solar so when the sun is shining, we can power the AP with that but in the dark/extended clouds - plan B is needed if our power is knocked out for the time being. We welcome all input on this.

Plants that we want in the GB's - anything that will grow easy and well. The rest will just have to stay out in the dirt garden - like the sweet potatoes and squash? Our garden is about 2 feet deep black compost and stuff grows like crazy in it (our okra gets to 14 feet tall or more). Squash plants get HUGE. But I want stuff growing in the AP that I can tend to easy from the house and bring stuff in to use in the kitchen right there. Greens of all kinds, beans, tomatoes (the AP gets around soil borne issues with maters here), strawberries - anything that isn't taking up too much space or getting too tall (like the okra). In our reg. garden we usually have sweet potatoes, tomatoes, bush and pole beans, okra, greens, beets, turnips, eggplant, cabbage, broccoli, etc. We also have blueberries in another area and a fig tree and some plum trees. I have paw paws to set out this spring and another fig. Herbs, too - oregano in the garden; thyme, rosemary, parsley, mints, etc. in pots. If I can put the mints in the AP that would help control them - they like to run amuck. I like to make my own sauerkraut - any one tried cabbage in the AP?

We are torn between the flood and drain and the constant flood methods - the GB's should be just a little higher than the FT once we drop the FT in the ground. Hoping we can gravity feed water back to the FT.

We have a son with five kids and one on the way - we try to help with the groceries as much as we can, plus we are getting up in years and I'm trying to make growing our food as easy as we can. I apologize for this being so lengthy but there are so many questions and ideas...and I've still got more questions to ask!! But not today. I'll spare you. Thanks in advance for any comments/ideas...

Hotsprings is a beautiful place. I used to live about an hour or two away from there in Camden. Very interrested to see what your set up ends looking like.

Well, we went out and looked over the area where we want to put the enclosed porch and we've decided to lengthen it another 8'. That should make it about 28 feet long and 12 feet wide. This will help shade that side of the house and get the end of the porch all the way to the end of the house so we can utilize as much of the southern winter sun as we can. I'm still reading the forum as much as I can. Got caught up with all of Mr. Bill's thread. We also have goats/Great Pyrenees dogs so we can relate to the goats getting into the garden stuff, etc. Chickens, too. Eventually we may be putting up a couple of high tunnel greenhouses. That's where I'd like to grow things like corn. Maybe we can keep out the corn worms if it's inside the GH. We also have trouble with squash bugs - hoping a green house will keep them out, too. We'll see. We're still in the planning stage - we have some stuff to do in the house and then we'll start on the new porch.

Thinking about rocks...we have a creek that runs on 2 sides of our place. Would that be a good place to get gravel for the GBs? Or too much chance for bad bugs/bacteria? There are beaver on this creek...

I'm making a list of items to buy that we can get now before we start to set up things - like a freshwater master test kit and thermometer. Suggestions for a start-up list anyone? Salt?

Camera Secateurs, to harvest your veges. Cane basket to photograph them in. Filleting knife. Spray bottle to mix your home made sprays, Dipel for caterpillars and sticky traps. Well that is just a couple of things that come to mind.

Your system sounds a lot like mine that I am almost finished making. 1000 gal buried 2 feet down and 3&1/2 ft high total inside my 12X16 greenhouse. I am going with catfish and crappie because they reproduce better than bass and trout. Perch do well though I believe. I think all of them will eat compost worms, which I too began breeding a couple months ago because 25 one pound fish will eat at least 1000 compost worms a month! I built my tank with 2X12, so I would have to say you are not wrong in building strong foundations, tank walls etc. My beds are also made from 2X12 even though they will be half hydroton which is rather light. If you are planning on using gravel, you should probably not rely on only plywood for your growbed bottom. The water is over 7 lbs/gal and gravel is even heavier. Also most the fish you mentioned will not eat duckweed except maybe the catfish. You have a lot of extra space for duckweed though which is what you need if you want to feed it to your chickens and goats Just try to keep your compost worms seperated because warm blooded animal feces can contain bacteria you DO NOT WANT IN YOUR AP system! (Especially if you have grandkids that may be eating fruit and veggies right off the vine and uncooked.) Compost with manure can be used on your regular garden after 6 months, but only veg waste compost worms should be put into your AP system. The last bit of advice I learned this week while setting up my growbeds (which also gravity feed back to fish tank) is definitely make them high enough. If your tank walls sits 3 feet above ground, then your GB's should be closer to 4 ft to give you enough inches for plumbing elbows and long enough sloped plumbing! You would also consider that this would mean your reaching over the growbed wall to work on your plants at closer to 5 ft depending on your GB depth. I know digging stinks, but my hubby made us quit digging 6 inches higher than I planned and it cost me an extra 8 inches of height to get the right drainage from one GB furthest from the tank... hope this helps. I look forward to see how yours turns out

Faye, I just finished reading your thread about starting with chickens. We've had chickens for years and they run loose in our dirt garden all the time. I tend to fence off what I don't want them getting in (like the tomatoes). They will fly over 6' high so fencing them out is tricky. We've learned what they will and will not eat - they will dig up sweet potatoes and eat on them for one thing, so we grow extra. We also let the goats in the garden sometimes. Like now - we haven't gotten anything started in the dirt garden for this year, yet, and we already had weeds over 5 feet tall out there so we turned in the goats today and they really went after them. Beats pulling weeds...as for my list - we have cane baskets and several fillet knives so that's covered. My niece next door takes pictures for us. She's a budding photographer. Spray bottle I can get. I do have some but they are already in use for other things. We have spent over 30 years on this place staying strictly organic - no poisons, etc. in the garden or anywhere on the place (40 acres). Sometimes it means the bugs win but that's the way it is. Squash bugs are the worst thing we deal with, the little monsters...

hi and welcome
ok ill make a start on your list
the iced in bit someone please correct me if im wrong but power outage then is not as bad as no power in the summer as fish are less active and you feed them less, so you probably wouldnt need to run the genny 24/7 till power came back on, you could try looking at this thread and search for other stuff like it viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9805

on what plants i would suggest you look at this thread
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1380

hope it works out for you

Lesslea, nice to meet you! I was from Oregon before I came to this part of the country (for college - then met my husband here and stayed, almost 40 years ago now). My parents and other family members and friends are still in Oregon. Yes, it does sound like our systems will be very similar. And yes, we do want fish that will eat the duckweed if possible so thanks for that tip. Yes, we know our GB's will be around 4' but that's ok. My hubby is 6'3" and our son is 6'4" so 4' isn't too tall for most of us. Even my 13 year old granddaughter is getting pretty tall already. We have raised beds in our dirt garden so we know about the reaching over 4' thing. Those beds are enclosed with cement blocks, two high, so you can sit on them while working in the beds but it's still a reach to get to the middle. When the okra is going strong, my husband has to cut it. It gets so tall and thick that I can't reach it. Even he has to stand on top of the bricks and bend each plant down to reach the tops to get the okra. We have 3 ponds on the place plus some big ditches that also hold water (they were already here when we bought the place years ago). I'm thinking about the duckweed again - maybe we should put the duckweed in one of the ponds instead of in the AP porch? Yes, I would like to use it for chickens/goats/cows, too, if possible. Yes, the worm farm for the AP would only be getting kitchen scraps, etc., no animal manure. We own a trash pickup/waste management business so we have lots of cardboard, etc. we bring home to lay down for the worms in the garden/blueberries. And local produce stores that have us pick up their waste produce so our chickens/livestock get that kind of stuff several times a week. Some can go into the worm bin. Not to speak of what comes from my own kitchen, too. I'm hoping that some of this can be used to feed the fish eventually...

GBHTREV - that's a very good point and not something we were taking into consideration about the cold and the fish not being so active (although we hope to keep that area warm enough for plants to continue growing all winter so hoping the FT will also stay warmer, too). Thanks! And thank you for the links - I'm checking them out. Regarding the elec. going out...we got up this morning and our power had been off during the night sometime. Don't know why. No storms or anything, the weather is very nice. There is a mile and half of lines before you get to the next house so if even a tree branch falls on the lines in between, we lose power when no one else does. There are commercial chicken houses up at that next place and if we can hear their generators going, we know they are without power, too. Yep, even that far away, we can hear them. So losing our power to AP set up is a very real problem for us. Grrr....

one thing that you could consider is the battery backup units that they use for computer systems if i remember right they used to keep our servers at our work going for 3hrs+ and the servers used a lot of power, so if you had one or a few of those ou may find you could keep an air pump running for quite a while, till at least the sun came up when a solar system could take over

I think duckweed in your other pond/s is a great idea to provide sufficient animal feed! plus you could throw animal waste into that pond to speed up your duckweed production without fish waste I don't normally post to people's new system forums, I must have sensed your Oregonian roots! Have fun on your project and keep us posted!

We have livestock in where the ponds are at so the ponds get manure washing in when it rains. One lower pond had 2 good sized bass come out of it a few years ago (we don't know how they got in there, either!). The main concern with the ponds is they will dry up if we get too hot and dry and that seems to be happening a good bit in recent years. If they dry up, would the duckweed die? Last summer was pretty bad...hope La Nina dries up and goes away before this summer hits. Even the creek was pretty dry and dead last summer except for certain holes. Hoping the beaver will help with some of that. If we get fish out of the creek, would they be ok to put in our FT?

you could always scoop up some duckweed and move it under your covered area in like a kiddie pool or something for a month or so... Duckweed has to be dried out anyway to make feed, so that heat may save you some trouble, just don't let all of it dry up!