Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I am excited to see how your raft bed will do. I know you will keep us posted. How long do you think till you build it.

Hard to say. Now I expect I will make a raft bed type trough for duckweed and water plants so that one I think will actually come sooner than an actual raft bed. Seeing as my past attempts at raft aquaponics have been rather dismal as far as the plant growth was concerned or maybe I should say the media based plants did so much better that the raft bed became a water plant bed.

I am looking at doing something I'll probably call a worm wash system. Not that I'm going to be washing worms but more that I need a way to rinse and recycle the nutrients from the tower inserts and things like that. I need some constantly flowing water that can stay well aerated for rinsing and have filtration that will accept whatever solids and old roots come from it without creating a breeding ground for bad bacteria or mosquitoes so I'm thinking along the lines of a duckweed tank with mosquito fish and an upper level with some media and worms and an empty portion of bed where water runs through from the pump to rinse off towers, inserts seed trays etc without my needing to go sterilizing everything all the time. Still trying to mentally work out how it should be done but it has to be right next to my planting bench to make things efficient.

sounds pretty cool, can't wait to see what you come up with.

Always planning the common sense and common solutions into your systems. Way to go.

Well trying to at least. Or more like I hate dumping rinse water out on the ground to just grow weeds and make a sloppy mess for me to walk through.

Moved some fish today!
Only about 41 though since I only had one IBC to use as transport and most of these catfish are big enough to eat. There are still 20 fish back in the old Big system and there are now 55 Channel catfish in NB900T (the 1000 gallon fish tank hooked to 48 Zipgrow towers.)
The other smaller system SF300T, now has 29 fish (1 koi, 1 big goldfish, and 27 bluegill)

I'll probably wait a few days before bringing over the rest of the channel catfish and starting to dismantle the rest of the old big system.

The 300 gallon system is still in the back yard with about 60 or so bluegill in it and that will probably be the last thing to move.

You're almost done with the daily commute to the old house! Do you plan on doing all of the eating involved with the catfish, or do you plan on selling them?

I'm going to look into getting the aquaculture permit so I could sell the fish if people want to buy them whole on ice or live.

But so far, we have managed to do most of the eating.

Hey TC

are you floating away yet? seems like your getting a lot of rain from debbie.....

jT

No Floating here, too much sand to collect the water for long. Trying to collect as much rain as I can to fill my big tanks but since I can't afford to install gutters yet is is rather tedious.

For some reason that injures up an image of you chasing around the rain drops carrying a rain barrel. That would be tedious.

Conjures?

LOL, I don't know, I think running around carrying a rain barrel probably would cause injures.

But tedious is right having to dump or pump buckets and tanks out all along the drip line.

One large storage tank is about half full now though. The other tank is still empty as I only just finished the drain plumbing and haven't hauled the pump over to that side yet.

Cuss that autocorrect!

that's funny. they actually have a website dedicated to auto correct mistakes, wish I could remember what it was.

Anyways, TC when you do get your gutters are you gonna pipe them directly into your rain barrel?