Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

OOOOOOHHHH! I want THIS for my grow bed media!

That would be lots of fun.

I saw something on youtube where someone was building a highway with lines marked with something like that.

It might attract moths at night, and when I saved a few green caterpillars that were eating my greens (normally I'd feed them to the fish), and sealed them in a jar to do the transforma thing, they turned out to be big grey night time moths. I always thought the green caterpillars were the white daytime moth.

So, remember my coworker who used medical leave to get out of working all last week, so I had to do it instead? Yeah, her. Well, she posted some very nice photos on Facebook, all time-stamped and geotagged, of her family's nice interstate vacation trip she went on, using my days off.

(Our manager is on Facebook, too.)



So, anyway, not much greenhousy stuff has gone on, thanks to all that. Saturday all my kids were here and I cooked a huge meal. Since (thanks to my coworker's machinations) I didn't have time to do any prep ahead of time like I usually do, we ate pie for lunch (made by my DIL) and had turkey and trimmings for supper. I kinda liked it that way. Maybe we'll make it a tradition.

I got 8 feet of bench built today, between cleaning up and babysitting my granddaughter and just plain running out of energy. (It takes me a few days to fully recover from a long work stretch.) But that was enough to make room for all the tools and supplies that have been sitting on top of the future fish tank, and the few scraggly plants I stuck in the greenhouse to see if they can survive the winter there, which were sitting on my digging place. (The sawhorses are just leaning on the bench, not supporting it!)


It wasn't raining, for the first time in weeks, so my neighbor came over to see what all the banging and sawing has been about. He helpfully told me that the strip my greenhouse is on, which lines up with his garden and greenhouse, sits on top of a lava flow. He says things grow real nice in the soil, but it's full of giant rocks and you can't dig holes in it worth a darn.

Oh, boy. There *are* a lot of nice big rocks in the landscaping around the place. I wouldn't mind having more, but I haven't a clue how I'd move them.

I'm hoping the lava flow maybe decided to curve just a bit between his place and mine. Since my next task is digging holes for Rubbermaid sump tanks, I guess we'll find out soon enough...

Back in my tech industry days, during a business trip that involved a lot of driving, one of my employees and I came up with an idea for putting grooves in highway pavement so as you drove over it, your tires would hum songs. We figured if you spaced the grooves right, you could even get people to drive at appropriate speeds by the tempo of songs you used. But we couldn't figure out any way to do a proof of concept model for testing, since we didn't have access to asphalt and heavy machinery. Or long stretches of pavement.

Oh, well.


I wonder if you could choose colors that wouldn't be as moth-attracting? People sometimes put yellow or red bulbs in their porch lights to keep the bugs away. I've always wondered if that worked, but I never tried it, because my eyes feel funny when everything's all red/yellow.

Too cool.

I constantly complain that the roads dont talk.

This...

In Victoria (the state next door) they have grooves in the side of the road that make a stack of noise when you wander out of your lane

And this...

A few years ago there was a string on a balloon for sale called "talking string" that, when you ran your fingernail down it, apparently said "Happy birthday" (I say apparently, because when I did it, it sounded like "VhhhhhVh Vhhh Vhhh.")

As a result of these things, I constantly bore Mrs. Bullwinkle every time we go to Victoria with stuff like "Why dont the roads shout WAKE UP! when you go off the track, or yell out the speed limit, or tell jokes every few miles. "

I think the proof of concept was the record player.

+1 for singing roads. You could have different genre in different lanes! And if you drifted onto the wrong side of the road in the Stairway to heaven lane, Satan could issue warnings in backwards speak

I think a Honda commercial had a singing road. They did the groove thing, the spacing between each individual grooves determined pitch, the spacing between groups of grooves determined tempo. It was cool.

A little google research digs this up.

But wait! There's more!

Hmmm. Looks like they beat us to it. I think it was 1999-ish when we dreamed it up. Oh, well.

So this nice guy named Bryan came out today to do a solar survey for us to see if we could benefit from solar power. He said our house is aligned exactly right, and our roof is perfect for solar panels. He had this awesome gizmo:

The vertical(ish) lines are daytime hours, and the horizontal(ish) ones are months of the year. The reflections of the trees show how much shade vs. light you'll have at any given hour of the day for each month. Basically the only part of it that shows any sky, over toward the right, is where the two deciduous trees are, so in the summer there's actually NO light hitting the south side of our house. At all.

Bottom line is, we could have a GREAT solar array on our roof, But we'd have to cut down the trees.


The trees make me happy. I don't think solar panels could make me happy the way trees do.

So...*sigh* looks like no solar power for us.

And in aquaponics-related news, my uniseals came today. I didn't get out to the greenhouse until late, but I got the basic outside frame of a 2- growbed stand knocked together, so I could get a better feel for how I want to position the sump tanks underneath, and how deep they need to go for me to be able to get into them.

The photo really shows the slope of the greenhouse -- the stand is actually just about level.

Now I'm debating whether to put the sump tanks perpendicular to the grow beds, with part of them sticking out into the center walkway of the greenhouse, instead of lengthwise. They wouldn't have to go as deep that way, since I'd be able to reach in without crawling under the grow beds, and I don't think it will be TOO crowded. I think I'll probably do that.

I've also discovered that I won't be able to fit 6 growbeds down one side of the greenhouse. 5 will fit nicely, though, so that will have to do.

Now I'm going to HAVE to find a singing road. And drive down it the wrong way.

Nice home/garden/space.

I'd be buying a bigger pump, and turning that gravel space into a trout stream.

Is there any reason why you couldn't put the solar panels on their own frame somewhere else? it seems you have space, and putting them on their own stand means you can make them track the sun to get lots of extra power. Or build a shed. A shed only costs two thousand dollars (sans concrete floor), and everyone needs more shed space. $2K isnt a lot extra to add to the cost of a solar setup.

And the 5 vrs 6 IBC's will allow that space between growbeds that I keep banging on about. If you crowd the ones for small plants and space out the last 2 to take up all the extra room, you'll create almost an extra growbed in the air, for those big plants that can be planted on the edges and corners. Things like squash, and cabbage can take up a quarter of the next growbed if you dont have a gap.

I have growhouse envy.

Good plan Bullwinkle.
I could never cut down a tree for the sake of solar power (as awesome as solar is). You can't hug a solar panel.

Thanks! I love it SO much. I still wake up every morning and think, "Wow! I really LIVE here!"


Heh. Then I'd have to buy a boat to transport building supplies to the greenhouse.


Yeah. This:
See back there where there's ground cloth on the ground? That's where the greenhouse is now. The sun-tracking solar array (which would take the entire system from ~$40K to ~$50K) would have to go between there and the house, in the middle of the peaceful refreshing view, in the center of the sunny part of the grass sort of lower-right-middlish of the photo. (It is SO GREEN in this part of the country. We've been up here for 15 years, and my brain still gets dazzled by the intensity of the green in spring/summer.)

I like the grass. Almost as much as the trees.

I asked if we couldn't just put big mirrors up high in the trees to redirect the sunlight around them to the solar panels on the house. That seems like it could work, don't you think?

I *could* use a shed, but again, it would pretty much have to go in that same spot, if it were going to be used to hold solar panels. That spot, and the one where I put the greenhouse, are pretty much the only places on the whole property that get full sun for any reasonable part of the day. And even so, putting the fancy gizmo down there showed me I'd be better off trimming down some of the deciduous trees back beyond them (they don't show in the photo). That might be something I'll consider, if it turns out the greenhouse needs more sunlight. But the previous owners had their garden in that spot, and struck me as the avid gardening sorts, so I think it probably worked okay the way it is.



The fifth grow bed will have its own stand, so that will work out perfectly. I love how you're always making my downsides into upsides.



I still can't believe it's mine. All mine! I would share it with you, if you could figure out how to make an inter-hemisphere travel portal. But then you'd have to help me build the RMH.