Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Meh, just don't eat it and you should be fine...ish.

Personally, I think the very minor risk of ingesting the toxin (and the even minor-er risk of absorbing it thru the skin) is worth the experience and picture.

Thought, you need to put a speech bubble above its head saying "She turned me into a newt!"

Interestingly (or not), they excrete tetrodotoxin, which is the same thing that is in pufferfish... so you might get a bit of tingly around your mouth, or you might simply suffocate as your diaphragm becomes paralyzed, depending on the the dosage.

I just got home from a 5-day conference. My greenhouse is nearly finished, but I haven't been out to see it yet because 1) it's pouring rain, and 2) I'm babysitting my gbaby Celia. So I'll post some photos my hubs took of it during construction. But first, a short gbaby interlude:


Celia: "Kwikky, Gwamma!"
Me: "Quickly?"
Celia: "No, kwikky."
Me: "Cricket?"
Celia: (shakes head) "No, KWIKKY."
Me: "Kwikky?"
Celia: (patiently) "No, Gwamma. Kangawoo says 'kwikky.'"
Me: "Oh, do you mean 'crikey?'"
Celia: "Yeah!"

Now I need a nap.

Once makes a good story, but now that I know what they are, I think I'll leave the experimenting to those more adventurous than myself.

Greenhouse construction shots, with Jeremy aka "fence guy."

Looking good well done

That's going to be a really nice space.

And all that room on either side for more

Chomping at the bit waiting for my next days off to start playing in my greenhouse! Meanwhile, I'm wondering, if I build wood frames to hold my IBC-slice (12-14-ish inches deep) growbeds, how sturdy do they need to be? Will some sort of 2x4" construction be sufficient, with adequate bracing? There was probably a time when I knew how to calculate such things, but it's buried in my long-ago past and has long since been buried under the years of mental sludge my brain has accumulated since then.

With my current design (based on what I've accumulated and the space available for assembling it in) I'll have one 100gal Rubbermaid trough (for sump volume) per 2 IBC slice grow beds, so I'm hoping to come up with a rack design that will hold 2 beds and straddle a partially buried trough underneath them, leaving enough room for easyish access to the trough.

Some day I'll work it up in Sketchup, but right now I'm mostly just working and sleeping and dreaming of aquaponics while driving between the workingplace and the sleepingplace, so that's not happening just yet.

My last day at my "extra" job is next week, and then I get to remember what having days off feels like again! At least until I look at my looming student loan debt and get scared into accepting another locum tenens position.

"The IBC of Aquaponics" book should give some hints.

A cubic metre of water (an IBC) weighs a thousand kg and they use a woodden pallet as a base on some.

I'd go for a wooden pallet for the top, and the pallet that the IBC came with for the bottom.

I like overkill.

G2N, your student loans should have the option for a income-based repayment. It doesn't change what you owe, just what your minimum monthly payment is. I'm doing this, then paying whatever extra I can to my smallest loans, which will pay those off quicker and reduce my total monthly payment even more, then sending the rest to the next smallest loan... Dave Ramsey debt-snowball style!

GO Dave Ramsey!!! One of the best things we ever did was to start working his plan. Highly recommend it.

BTW, your greenhouse looks good. Slightly envious, but thumbs up nonetheless

My last year in grad school I was doing my internship in an outpatient mental health clinic 3 days/week, working night shift on an inpatient psych unit 4 days/week, and going to classes for 4-6 hours in the evening 2 days/week. It was a recipe for sleep deprivation, made worse by the fact that every other Wednesday the schedules aligned such that I was up for 24 hours straight (8 hours outpatient clinic, 5 hours class, 8 hours work). Then I would crash and sleep for like 20 hours, and then start it all over again.

One day during that part of my life, someone signed up on the Dave Ramsey website wanting to be contacted by realtors he endorses. Except they didn't type in their number correctly, and the mistyped number they entered just happened to be mine. I had just dragged my exhausted self home from work that morning and was drifting off to sleep for a few blissful hours before having to head out again, when my phone started ringing. I was getting calls from realtors every 5-10 minutes, all of them calling me by someone else's name and wanting to sell me houses I couldn't afford. I couldn't turn my phone off, because it was my only alarm clock, and in those days I was so perpetually tired that I would sleep around the clock if something didn't wake me up, and I had to work again that night. At first I couldn't figure out why people were calling me "Sandy" and trying to sell me houses, until one of them happened to mention the website, so I went looking for a way to get my number off it so I could SLEEP.

There wasn't any.

I tried emailing all the email addresses I could find on the site, asking for help to make the phone calls stop, but I knew that was going to take hours, and I needed those hours for sleeping! So I turned to Twitter.

Long story short, Dave Ramsey himself responded via Twitter, and actually tweeted his direct phone number for me to call so they could get the problem fixed. As soon as I did, the phone calls stopped -- well, within 15 minutes or so, anyway.

The whole saga still cost me a couple of hours of lost sleep, but left me with fond feelings toward ol' Dave, who tweeted his private office phone number to a bazillion people on Twitter so one tired nurse/student could sleep in peace.

I got my loans consolidated, which will bring the total payment down substantially, and have deferred the larger chunk while paying off some smaller non-consolidatable ones. So far, so good. I'm a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and we're in great demand, which means you can pretty much work as many jobs as you can stay awake for, but I also went to a very expensive nursing school for 4 years (you go where you get accepted, if you want to be a nurse, because it's so hard to get into school!) so my loans are pretty impressive, and not in a good way. :-/

My primary job is only a 0.6FTE (60% of full-time) position, so I take on other jobs here and there as I can to fill out the budget a little better. Right now I'm working 6 days/week, though, and commuting 63 miles each way to the temporary job, which is really too much. (Especially for someone with a burgeoning aquaponics obsession!) Next week is my last week of that, fortunately, and then I'm gonna see if I can still remember how to sleep for 24 hours in a row!

Thanks. I'm excited about getting to play in it. I've wanted a greenhouse FOREVER, but our nomadic lifestyle never allowed for it until now. It was a long wait -- I'm ready to start making up for lost time!

Dunno if you got my return PM, back when the board kept eating things, but I am eagerly soaking up RMH information whenever I have a spare moment and working brain cells at the same time. Thanks for the help on that -- I'm looking forward to trying that out, too!

If pallets work, then I'm thinking the 2x4" construction I've been visualizing should definitely be sturdy enough. (Unless they make pallets differently in Australia...!)

Get the hardwood pallets they are a lot stronger