Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Yeah, second the trees. I'm looking more and more at the trees part of this APp setup as it s so novel. More pics, more pics!!

The trees are doing ok... My pear tree has two pears on it, I would like to have more, but there you go. My grapefruit has two grapefruit on it, would like to have more, but there you go. My lime tree blossomed like mad, but has no fruit on it. The grafted plum, peach tree decided to lose all of it's leaves. I pruned it back vigorously. Hopefully that will encourage it to rebound. I had put in a cherry tree that I had from before I setup my system. Last year it kind of lived, this year it looked like it was going to bud, then just stopped, I decided to prune it back too. The tree had dried out completely. So I pulled it out yesterday. The good news is that the lemon tree has new leaves, it had not changed for nearly a year. No new leaves, the old leaves stayed put, but this spring it decided to branch out. I am finding that I have to prune the pear tree often, it grows vigorously. Yesterday, Armstrong Garden Centers had Moringa on sale for $5.99, so I replanted a Moringa back into my system. We will see how it does this year. All my other plants are taking off so much more than last year, so hopefully the Moringa can get to a large enough size to be able to handle winter.

@Ronmaggi,

Did you happen to see my question on the previous page.

Yes, I did see the question, no, I do not recall the outside temp. I just recall that it was incredibly cold for San Diego.

Not AP related, but I just finished making this piñata for Miss Maggi's 5th birthday party.

Very clever RM

The party was today, none of the adults wanted to see the piñata smashed. When they saw it they all said, I did not know they made Beatles piñatas. I responded with, they don't, I did. The kids of course smashed it open. It is, however, repairable. It will be put back together and become part of our decor. My father actually asked me to make him one for Christmas, or Birthday, Father's Day... It was inexpensive to make, but man did it take a while.

Very cool, Ron

YOur system looks nothing like the original drawings!!!

Epic fail Brah!

Determined to make my raft work, I removed it to paint it.
Then I siliconed down the airline tubing and suction cups to keep the airstones from moving around.
it took quite a bit of scrubbing to get the bioslime off so I could silicone everything down. Now I need to let it cure for 48 hours. When I went to home despot, I asked for paint for polyethylene, the guy gave me some paint and I used it. Then, upon closer reading, it said that it does not stick to polyethylene. I actually asked if they had Krylon Fusion. They just had the Rustoleum paint that I used. The funny thing is that I actually sell polyethylene primer from Rustoleum at my work, but I did not feel like going there to buy some... We will see how this does.

So the paint peels if you look at it wrong. I suppose I should scrub it off, then use some Krylon fusion... But that is a bit of work. I could also just put some cladding around the frame. I was originally going to put cladding around everything anyways, but the other half actually likes the way it looks without. anyways, the water that was in the raft was full of gunk. I did not want all do that gunk to go away, so I bailed most if it into the growbeds. Then the water got very murky. I have been running the system on constant flood for a few hours now, and things are much clearer. In the growbed with the most growth I noticed some roots in the standpipe. I pulled out about a meter of cucumber roots. I only have one cucumber plant still alive in this growbed, but it is massive. How do know that it was cucumber? Because the roots smelled like some of the best smelling cucumber that I have ever smelled. I hope the fruit from it taste as good as the roots smelled.

Love smelly roots
Does it make a difference if you paint it on thin and then a second coat like spray painting?

It is spray paint. It says that is is for plastic on the can, but not polyethylene. It is tricky stuff to stick to.

the yellow flowers are from my cucumber plant. It climbed up into the grapes and is doing far better than I was expecting.

Seeing that the cucumber is growing up on the grape reminded me of the Frans De Waal TED talk where the monkeys get a reward and one got cucumber while the other got a grape. If you haven't watched it you'll get a laugh.