Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Th heat may also be causing the blossoms to drop.

Everybody else is say lack of pat. They said i should have started with just greens non fruitable plants first, then progress to fruitable plants. i have been adding patasssium to help things go along. i dont want to add alot because of my fish. i just wish i could call somebody and talk to them. i do better on the phone than typing things out. any help i would be thankful.

Feed the fish more. If your nitrate is 0 and the plants are showing signs of not getting enough of what they need then everything is gonna be low. Perhaps getting a higher quality feed can help too. If you are feeding the cheap pond diet or goldfish food your fish and your plants may be missing out on a lot of nutrition.

Heat can make blossoms drop too.

Wait till it starts to cool off this fall before closing in the bottom or ends of that greenhouse. I'm in a humid climate so I would say a swamp cooler is pointless (swamp coolers don't cool a swamp), however if you are in a dry part of TX, then perhaps a swamp cooler might be effective.

I'm feeding them the aqua max 5000. It's shows a lot better feed than catfish feed. I will start feeding them more. I was going to add fish to to see if that would help too. I have around 90 and want to put about that many more in there. Thanks. I live in east tx and we have a high humidity here so that answered my question about that. Thanks a lot. My corn started tasseling but no corn. Just frustrating. Lol. Maybe it will all work out. I'm prob not being patient enough. Lol. Thanks again

Yea the aquamax is a good choice of feed.
What kind of fish do you have? How big are your fish tanks?

Corn is a tricky one for a new system too. But being in east TX, I would guess it is just too hot and humid this time of year. A bit more patience. If anything is "failing" but just sucking up nutrients you don't have enough of right now, pull it out to make room and share nutrients with what you think may do better. Of course if the squash is helping shade the media beds, they might be worth leaving for that purpose until you have something else you want to put in their place. Start thinking ahead a bit, as things cool down in the fall, you may see some real activity. And think ahead to the cool season crops so you can have your seedlings ready to go in when you start pulling the hot weather stuff out.

Im using blue gill fish and i have a 700 gallon fish tank inground and a 275 gallon ibc tote inground for sump tank. i started circulating water on july 9 so i guess its just to early to tell. i see most people start with alot of green things. i bought a few things from lowes to strart with. i guess most people start with seeds to let the system catch up with everything. I dont know the best way to start out, but i dont have alot of people to talk to around here about it so have to bother yall.. lol All my plants are really green but no fruit. alot of blooms but like yall have been saying it might be the heat. I have got all my info from yall and youtube and from the help from disney land. lol we took that ride that shows all the ways they grow veggies for the park. pretty neat. all my coliflower just grows leafs and no buds. I put 6 yellow squash plants, 12 zucinni plants, and 20 greenbean plants, and 20 corn plants into the system by seeds and i think thats were its all going. i have alot of greens like turnip, collard, and mustard starting to grow but very slow. Im adding a mixture of potassium(muriate of potash) (1 tablespoon to 1 cup mixture) about two quarts a week. not seeing much help there. i order some potassium nitrate online yesterday. Dont know if that will help. im think like you said start pulling some out to balance it out. i have about 90 fish in there now i was thinking to add 50 or 60 to it this weekend to see if that would help. thanks for you time

Ok, you are not doing hydroponics so adding a lot of chemical fertilizer could be problematic. Remember that in hydroponics they have to dump ALL their nutrient and start fresh every few weeks because things get out of whack. Most people doing aquaponics are not going to dump everything and start fresh every few weeks because that would be really hard on the fish and bacteria. Therefore, if you are doing aquaponics you have to be really cautious about just adding chemical nutrient salts unless you have the lab or testing equipment to allow you to test for just about everything so that you can correct things if you start getting all out of whack.

Adding too much of things like potassium chloride could be upping the chloride levels in the system to a point where some plants might not like it, especially if your source water has much chloride or if you have been using lots of hydrochloric acid to adjust pH or if you salted the system during cycling or for fish health.

Plants not doing well is not always due to Lack of something, sometimes it can be due to too much of something else. Also, pH can have a great impact on how plants are doing.

Add MORE patience, LESS chemicals.
Started circulating water on July 9, that is only about 5 weeks!!!!!! Most systems are only just barely cycled up in 6 weeks.
Under ideal conditions you might expect to see some FAST squash and zucchini starting to bloom at 40 days and you haven't even had your water cycling around for that long.
Relax a little, plants still take time to grow in aquaponics and a brand new system is not going to be meeting ideal conditions but that doesn't mean it isn't working or that you should do anything to it to try and fix it.

Ok so went back and looked at the amount of grow bed in the system.
If your testing shows that even when you are feeding your current fish as much as they will eat in 15 minutes however many times a day you are feeding is not causing any ammonia or nitrite to show, then yes you probably could add some more fish. For this first season I would still only recommend about 1 fish per cubic foot of grow bed media which would be a total of about 135 fish. Next year you can decide if you feel confident enough to run more bluegill than that since you are probably only going to grow them to about 1/3rd of a pound but it is never wise to overstock a first year system.
Anyway, that would be adding only about 45 fish to your current number and only do it if your water tests show that even feeding as much as the current fish will eat you don't get any ammonia or nitrite spikes. I would say test the fish tank water about an hour after feeding.

Now if you really want to go adding chemicals to the system to try to get the results you want from the plants, then I recommend you get a whole bunch of test kits and do some research into the chemical makeup of the hydroponic nutrient solutions that work best for those plants, pull out the fish and do hydroponics, or perhaps simpler, just buy the hydroponic solution mix since other people have already done quite a lot of research into nutrient mixes for hydroponics.

I don't recommend trying to correct aquaponics using chemical fertilizers indiscriminately. You need to test for lots of nutrient levels in the water (you can take samples and send them off to a lab for probably about $40 to get some basic irrigation water testing and analysis done to see what you have going on) before you go just adding things to try to correct it. Seaweed extract if often added and we have found it to be a fairly safe way to add potassium and trace elements but that is usually adding like a cap full per grow bed every few weeks for the first couple months or so. pH buffers are generally added based on system pH and choosing either a calcium or potassium type buffer based on the plants if they are showing signs that they need potassium or calcium or by using tests that show the calcium levels in the water. Iron chelate is usually added based on when the plants show signs of iron deficiency but it is also possible to get a test kit that will show the iron level in the water and then you can dose to meet say a 2 ppm-3 ppm level. I would use caution when dosing with anything that might have other elements that could build up in the system unless you have some way to test those. They do make chloride tests and phosphorus tests and many other test kits if you have the money and time to spend testing all sorts of different things.

Or you can take a deep breath and enjoy the beauty of the vegetative phase of plant growth. Do a little more reading and realize that coli flower is a cool weather crop and this heat may be inhibiting budding. Look up references that might show pictures of different nutrient deficiencies of your plants so that you might be able to recognize them rather than guessing (however sometimes it is hard to tell if there are multiple deficiencies or lock-outs going on.)

Here is an update on all my plants. I have an ear of corn spouting out. thats pretty cool. Alot of cucumbers setting on and a few cherry tomatoes.

More veggie pics

As a Texan, no doubt you are aware of the benefit of a swamp cooler... until the humidity is up. TC's suggestion-- a water feature would be great. Utilize your 'prevailing wind' side, and all you need is a big industrial fan. Cheaper, I think. Another thing to consider might be a 'passive system'...

Passive air uses the ground temps to cool air. a network of oversize PVC buried at min. 15", and you can feed cool air from the ground.. Usually, a passive air system goes in before the construction is completed... weaving the pipe back and forth at roughly 18" width the space of the construction... then a 'high pipe' intake at the height of your building or room, a 'low output' at the floor level... in the winter, it reverses.

I've toyed with the idea of sinking 'ponds', or 'pseudo streams' in the same way-- to rear trout here in Vegas, I'd need to keep the water cold- and with our average temps at 74F, it ain't gonna happen. We're riding at 106 this week... but if I had 5' trenches... the water could stay cool... then circulate it through the fish tank... out into the grow beds, then back underground to cool...
A girl has gotta have a dream.

man that would be cool to try. how far do you have to go into the ground to make a difference on you temperature. you just pipe into the ground far enough for it to cool down kinda of like a cave or something like that.

You need to go down about 2metres (over 6') to reach ground that stays very close to your annual average temperature in open areas. Only 15" down the soil is going to get quite hot in a Vegas summer, although if that ground is permanently shaded it will help a bit.

To give you a bit of an idea about temperature variation vs depth, a friend of mine did some testing of the variation diurnally and annually, for a seismograph station, and some results are posted here:

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~map/weathe ... ofile.html

man that is pretty neat. i wish i had thought of that before construction. thanks again maybe i can do that on generation 2 lol. thanks again.

Man had an bunch of spider mites invade my plants. had to put a stop to them. a combination of safer soap, fish oil ,and hot pepper wax . funny story, my brother in law started to google how to get rid spider mites. all these left handed tabacco web sites started poping up (website 421) lol i guess spider mites like marijuana also.lol they said to chop up habanero peppers in a food processor and then stem them over the stove and mix the juice into water and spray that on them. Instant death. It is kinda of hard to make very hard on the family to breathe it while your fixing it. It works. It was just funny that all those web sites popped up.

I think you just got Charlie's attention.