Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I got 16 from the local concrete plant for a slab of coke they had truck wash

My barrel system has been going fairly slowly.... I had a few things to tweak, and a mod or two to make to the system, and I haven't done them yet... I have actually had the system switched off for a couple of months and I only turned it back on again the other day..

Weather is warming up, I'm going to really try and get it moving soon, must check to see if I have baby yabbies too, I didn't want to disturb them to much so I haven't had a good check of the females in a while.

So how is the system? Any new pics?

Blue barrel system is slowly having bits and pieces done to it..

On the yabby/duckweed side of the system, I had troubles with the pipe work not being large enough. Originally I used 19mm black pipe, but the water flow was causing some barrels to overflow. I added in 25mm pipework and fittings, with the fittings attached slightly lower than the original ones. This has worked a treat, none of the barrels are overflowing anymore, I left the original black pipes in there for now just as a backup..

Next poroblem was excess heat. The duckweed and azola wasn't getting a chance to really get hold and grow decently in the barrels. I had hoped the duckweed covering the half barrels would stop the water heating up too much in the hot sun, but the other week the water temp was 35 degrees.. I found a dead yabby and he was bright orange as if he was cooked

I thought about where I had seen duckweed growing in the past, and often it had been in shaded to semishaded places where it really flourished, so I build a shade cover over the top of this side of the system. The duckweed, azola, and C1's water weed have all taken off and I've been feeding it to my silver perch on a regular basis..

Plant side is still needing work, auto syphons aren't working well on a few of the beds, but looking at it today there's some growth in the seedlings that I put in a couple of weeks ago

Hi Joel, was thinking of doing a system with "orangeclaw" see you're already doing it ... LOL

PS ... Book etc arrived, deeply engrossed thanks.

May PM you in a couple of days regarding blue barrels

Good to see that weed is doing its thing-EB

Good to see you're incorporating the cooking int the AP system, now thats synergy

Thanks for the info on the part shade, any time i tried to grow duck week out side in half blue barrels it died. now i know why. my perch demolish a half tank full in a matter of hours. off to the store that shall not be named for some shade cloth. What % did you use?

Joel ...

Looks good!

Time to try a few tropicals if you are getting warm in those bins maybe?


BTW, I notice that city farmers always seem to have a few blue barrels cheap.

hey Joel, have you bought your next-door neighbours out yet? Or are you just going to keep going up with the systems?

Jaymie, hehe EB was talking about the front yard when we were there(I).

Yep........ Front yard is gunna be enclosed with a fence hopefully early in the new year, that should give me about 13m x 12m to play with.. woohooo

Johnnie, do you think tilapia would survive in the same tank as yabbies? Have you mixed them at all? I have had some small rosy barbs and goldfish in with the yabbies for a while to keep down mozzies.

Worth a shot, if they are fairly well sized I think.

Joel, how is this system going? I saw the re-run of the Gardening Australia segment on the weekend and was wondering. Did you get many baby yabbies (wasn't there a thread here somewhere recently with some pics)? Is it worth the effort of cutting all those drums?

Nova

Nova, the system is going very averagely... Well very average on the plant production side of things, I still haven't played with my auto syphons in the growbeds to any great extent, so the growbeds are not working to their fullest capacity, and because the water just tends to flow straight through them, the gravel is not getting completely wet, and the plants are struggling to get their roots into water..

The yabbies are doing well though, I'm about ready to pull out all of my big ones and eat them, then disperse the littlies through the barrels so they have some space to grow.. I'll try and count up the babies when I do it, and see roughly how many I got.

*grabs garlic and heads for the car*