Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Iv thought of makeing a Rocket Mass heater for a green house (not that we need it in Florida) Mostly to do off season plants such as wa termellon in the winter. You got any tips or anything on that?

Take a look on Rob's (Web4Deb's) Geodesic Dome Greenhouse thread, there is a bunch of RMH info! As well as a lot of other cool stuff.

Below some greenhouse/GB pics, it is very important to keep these things well documented you know... ;





The GH has become the favourite space to be in. We're getting some chickens to live beneath the GB, so we will have lovely relaxing cluckcluck sounds to mix in with the relaxing water gurgles. Very Zen.

Thank you for the direction to look in, as for the chickens, be sure ya know what ya are doing. we find our chickens in places all the time we dont want em...but the cluck cluck is relaxing....till guss crows.

We went out for a week, with all running well and a friend keeping watch/feeding the catsies. Home today and all still well, but I noticed the cat fish behaving a little unusual . Sudden bursts of speed and turning sideways.
During my endless hours of reading random posts here on this pretty cool site I came across these symptoms a long time ago, flashing was the word. So I studied the subject again, prepared a salt-bath (sea salt without any additives) of 20 ppt and dipped the fishies for about half an hour . One fish seemed to have a vague hint of white spots , no other visual symptoms.
I added enough salt to the system to get the solution up to about 2.5 ppt and will see if the catsies behave nicely tomorrow.

We just have our strawberry GB in blossom and no suitable place to relocate them so hopefully they will survive the new salty environment. We did not salt the system before, we have a soilgarden as well and would like to use the system water if we'd please. Now I see this as a nogo, don't want to put any salt into the backyard garden...

Can you shut the water off to the strawberry bed for a couple of days? Shouldn't hurt the plants much at all to give them a water vacation.

Thanks Mr Bill, it is possible, but the salt is in the system water so they would be confronted with this eventually. Well so far so good for the strawberries, no sign of unhappiness. Some fishies still flashing occasionally, how long would the treatment I gave them sort effect I wonder...

The salt bath has been very helpful, the flashing has almost ceased. The strawberries are still going prima, some leaves seem a little affected but nothing dramatic.

That went cool!

in reference to your december update about unfrozen water at -1 degrees C. If you had already salted it would lower your freezing temp slighly.

brian.

We have had a leek in one of the growbeds since last year. It was growing very steadily, but slowly. I have been checking it for a while, and found the stem was getting softer by time. Today it was really beginning to feel like a hollow stem and I was fed up. I yanked the leek out, and it became a garlic all of a sudden .

Look, here is a picture of the magic leek as proof!

Hi Hoeve!

Last year your system had an infesation of springtails (aka collembola). I didn't find any info on the forum about how to eliminate them and I hope you can help me out.

Did those looked something like this? :
http://46.18.32.69/~doehetzelf/taxa/proiinae.htm
http://cream-itn.eu/research

They lived under the gravel or hydroton right?

They say that this creatures are harmless but I guess in an AP environment I count those as pests because they are so successfull in reproduction.
Gardeners say that those only show up if you overwater your plants (guess what.. we are overwatering in AP somehow )

So could you tell me please how did you eliminate them?

I can reduce their numbers if I flood the bed out .. but couple of days later they're back.


thanks in advance,
Attila

Hi Attila,

I did not eliminate them. There are a lot of them in the system, but as far as I can see they are not doing any harm. They eat dead material. I mentioned earlier that something was sucking the juice out of my lettuce, but I do not think it was the springtails.

No worries, try to get to know them and it will be ok. A natural predator may be a key to control their numbers.

Good luck!

Thanks for the quick response!

Good to know that it wont be the problem for your lettuces.
Hopefully they are beneficial indeed cos they are so many.
You can't see their real numbers unless you raise the water level in the growbed above the media. Believe me they are thriving. (try it when you have time)
They are so many that they have to eat other things too not just fish poo and dead matters.

I have worms too in my growbed but those can limit their increment. It seems springtails can't.
As for their predators I couldn't find any. Maybe beneficial nematodes could eliminate them but there is no reference about it. I think I'll try sticky traps but without feromon I don't know how to attract them there. Maybe a light in the dark will do the trick.

Best wishes,
Attila

Hoeve, have you seen this website selling RMH DVD's?

http://www.woodburningstoves2.com/

Autumn falls. Any pictures of this year?

Wooooowww, what did I take a long time to get into gear and post agian. But here goes;

A lot has happened, after the switch to catfish for last summer, with also some carp and crawfish, a lot of fish trouble came up. Most of the catfish died of ich, and every couple of days carp was floating, because of ich and because of CARP(disease which turn the poor fish into a pinecone, all scales open wide). A couple of salt experiments followed, some better than others.
System is running on 3 ppt now. No more carp, three catfishes, and the added 32 trouts autumn last year are doing really well. The saltlevel has effects on the taste of the vegetables, I am not to happy about it.
The cats are in the fishtank and the trouts are in the sump. And this works out very well. Trouts in the fish tank, water murky and the SLO gets obstructed from time to time. Trouts in the sump and the sump+ FT stay pretty clear! Much better.

Because of the very soft winter this year I was able to keep the system going, packed with fingeling fish and plants. So the season started out with some lovely little cabbages and very nice AP-turnip soup!

As a test I have sown cauliflower autumn last year and recently I transplanted the pretty big seedlings to our soil garden. Up to now they have all survived.