Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Modern day pirates... don't make them like they used to.... once upon a time... it would have been...

Arrrgh... that'd be right matey.....

Then again, they never made them like they used to... It is amazing how bad people get romanticized over time. Hopefully I won't live long enough to watch "Ted Bundy:a Story of Love"

Lol I had to double take cause my mind went to Al Bundy.

Looking good.

That ammonia level wont take long to drop now that you have nitrites.

I did the first time but found the effect to be minimal. When I emptied the growbed later I still found a good half inch of fine silt in the bottom. I wonder if it's there with my new system.... the gravel I got this time was significantly cleaner to start with.

On a positive note I'm looking at trying to chain myself to a mortgage in the next 6 months or so and when I actually live in a place owned by my bank I'll build a more permanent system and probably switch to expanded clay rather than blue metal. Either that or I'll actually wash that gravel properly and take my time this time.

I was supposed to have today off work, but I didn't, because of my malingering coworker. And, because she extended her medical leave yet again, I had to give up yet another of my dwindling supply of days off for the month. Which normally would only have annoyed me a little, but it was one of the 3 days I had managed to hang on to during the 10 days my son and daughter-in-law will be here visiting from Virginia. 10 days. And I am going to be working for nearly all of them. THAT made me angry. I'm not very good at angry. I don't do it often, so I'm out of practice. So I find it wearing.

I came home after work and my granddaughter snuggled up next to me on the couch and we watched Leap Frog videos together. That made me feel a little better. Then her mommy dragged her off to take a bath and go to bed, so I decided to go spend a few minutes in my greenhouse, out in the dark rainy night. I took along some random plant parts (pineapple top, celery base, and a Romaine lettuce base that looked like it wanted to make some roots) I've been babying on the kitchen windowsill while waiting to have a grow bed to stick them into, and a couple of seeds (green beans and snow peas) I had soaked overnight in the sprouter. The sound of flowing, gurgling, splashing water, accompanied by the rain on the roof of the greenhouse, is surprisingly soothing. I felt better almost immediately.

I hadn't put together the water distribution pipes for the top of the grow bed yet, and that seemed like a good quick project that wouldn't mess up my work clothes or keep me up too late. I even managed, despite my post-work fog-brain, to do a little algebra in my head to decide how many of what size holes to drill to keep the flow evenly distributed. Incoming pipe is 0.5", so pi(0.25)^2=x*pi*r^2 where x is the number of holes of diameter r to equal the same area...I ended up with x=8 and using 1/8" holes. That seems a little small to me, but I had to stick with numbers I could handle in my very tired brain, and 1/4" holes were too big to allow for enough of them. I added one extra hole at the farthest point from the inlet, for good measure, and timed the fill/drain cycle to make sure I hadn't messed anything up. It stayed right at 12 minutes, and the pump didn't go dry during the fill cycle, so it's good for now. I'll have to keep an eye out for bioslime buildup. I don't know how other people decide how many/what size holes to use, so I'm just winging it...any advice from those more experienced would be welcome!

Here's the system so far. The water is pretty red, so I've got some cleaning/filtering to do. The flexible hose to the right is the temporary feed from the pump (in the sump under the grow bed) up to the fish tank. I'll replace it with PVC eventually. The pipe stuck into the 3" elbow coming out of the fish tank (on the left) is to divert some of the flow back to the sump, because there's too much for one grow bed. The two visible plants are the pineapple top and the lettuce. The celery hasn't sprouted very tall yet, so it's kind of lost in the gravel. I put the seeds in two corners of the bed, where I can find them again. If/when they sprout, I'll move them to better locations. The seeds are a couple of years old, so we'll see what happens.

Did you know that if you insert the symbol for pi in a message, it causes a SQL error?

distribution pipes for the top of the grow bed ... generally... 6mm holes.... about 100mm apart... so closer to 1/4"

Thanks, Rupert! That will be easy enough to fix.

I just drilled holes and then water came out...

Me too.

Well, darnit. And there I went doing all that hard thinking and calculating in my head and stuff, when I didn't have to!

Ammonia is down to 0.5 ppm, Nitrates up to 10. Or maybe 20, since those two colors look just exactly the same on my chart. Or maybe I'm a little bit colorblind to shades of orange, who knows? Anyway, YAY!

Nitrites are 0. pH is holding steady at 7.6 (if I do it with the low test) or 7.4 (if I do it with the high test).

So when the ammonia gets to 0, I need to dose it again, is that right? This time I should probably figure out how much to put in, instead of just randomly adding too much.

Anyway, things are happening, even if it's slowly. I keep sticking random stuff into grow bed #1. That's a little fig tree, back in the back. And three of the snow pea seeds are sprouting, although you can't see them yet.

The little re-sprouting Romaine lettuce looks quite content...

And the celery root is happily re-growing too.

Results are good!

When are you able to get some fishies, now is a good time if you can