Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Well it's in Vancouver but close enough. It's http://portlandpondsupplies.com/ . My wife thought the guy was a bit creepy and their prices are bit on the high side. But he has some decent information and some good ideas. It's just a little hole in the wall. But he showed me a pump he'd reccomend I use and then found it a lot cheaper ($50) on amazon.

We have had a couple decent days with no rain but I've been at work. I'm hoping the weather holds on Sunday so I can get out and finish cleaning my IBC's. and getting some holes cut.

Take your time responding to my PM. It's no great rush.

I think when I checked the forecast, tomorrow was pretty much the only day for the next week that had a chance of some non-rainyness.

Which is, of course, exactly what I expected, since I couldn't expect it to actually be SUNNY on my DAYS OFF, now could I?!? *sigh*

I think he probably tried it but they were always eating the scenery.


P.S. The suns been pretty sparse this Winter. We've gotten a bit more than you but not much.

My goats are eating the bark off some big old Douglas firs I don't want to lose. That's another project I've gotta tend to. Boy, having fun sure is a lot of work sometimes. I might need a vacation from my vacation by the time I'm done.

I miss the sun. That's the hard part of living here. But then springtime finally comes and it's so amazingly, breathtakingly, unbelievably, overwhelmingly beautiful that I forget all about all the wet cold grey days it took to make it that way.

Until winter rolls around again.

(And the beat goes on...)

I'm originally from the Canadian Prairies and even on those -30 winter days the sun was shining and the skies were blue. It wasn't until I moved to the PNW did I understand what 90 days of straight rain and clouds can do to a person's mood. You really do appreciate the spring when it rolls around. I just wish it would come sooner then it does.

My mother snowbirds in Yuma for the winter so I'll be visiting her for 2 weeks at the end of February to recharge my batteries in the sunshine. I can't wait!

My AP fish tank has occupants! Not the originally intended ones, yet, though. I was wandering through Petsmart today and they had various colors of mystery snails for sale, so I bought a couple of gold ones and a couple of ivory ones, and dropped them in to start munching on the algae that's started growing there.

I've been reading up on KH and GH and CO2 and trace elements in the aquarium forums. I still don't really have a good handle on how an AP grow bed filtration system would affect the ecology of a planted aquarium. But maybe if I keep at it long enough, it will all start to come together.

Today my granddaughter and I built Martha Stewart nestboxes for our overachieving chickens who have decided to begin laying eggs in the dead of winter at only 5 months of age.


They appear to have passed the QA inspection.


Then we did this.

Which is why I haven't done any AP work yet today.


Sent from my iPhone, typed with my thumbs.

No problems with the chooks, 3 to 7 months for laying and winter eggs. Mine were summer chooks and I bought 3 that reached 6 months and started laying mid winter. No long periods between eggs unless we have high heat again.

See that little tree just left of center?

We have lived in this house for five months. I have walked past that tree hundreds of times. other than distractedly admiring its fullness and symmetry, I never really looked at it. Until yesterday, when I noticed it leaning to one side. Thinking the saturated ground was making its roots lose their grip on the earth, I went over to see if I could prop it back up. That was when I noticed...

It's a silk Christmas tree.


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Silk, nice. All I got as a kid were the lousy cotton ones...

I don't know if it's really silk. They always call them silk trees, or silk plants. Do you think they're actually made from genuine silk?

That's probably a rhetorical question, since if it were bothering me enough to be a real one I would've Googled* it by now.



*I can finally use "Google" as a verb without feeling like a traitor, since my son is no longer working for Yahoo! Search. It's a huge relief. Of course, there's always a trade off, since now I feel vaguely guilty for using Flickr instead of SmugMug, although he assures me it's unnecessary. Maternal loyalty is a complicated beast.


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I am taking the plunge. Henry the pleco is a major poop-machine, so he's going to power an indoor AP system. YAY!

I started a new thread for that one. You can see it over here.

Here's a mystery.

There is algae growing on the back of my aquarium.

(That's not the mystery. That part makes perfect sense.)

Except in the top six inches. There's a perfectly level line of demarcation all the way across the back of the tank, above which there is no algae.



I need to know why this is. I can't bring myself to clean off the algae until I know. It's the most brightly-lit area, nearest the light. The algae-eating inhabitants eat from all areas, not just the top. The change from algae to not-algae isn't even very gradual. It just stops.

Help me figure this out, people. I want to sleep.


(Also I made some progress on the pleco aquarium AP system today, but I'll put that in its own thread.)

Perhaps the lower areas of the fish tank are slightly etched, making it easier for the algae to attach. And as such, the algae has only attached to the easiest parts so far, and in short time the colony will spread. Just a hypothesis.

WOW.. this was such an interesting, funny, confusing, helpful read...

I'd read a little, take notes, read a little, laugh... Rinse, repeat..

I've got tons of notes in my new App, Evernote (thanks for the info about it)

Look forward to spring pics..