Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I'll stop the slew there, as I seem to have tons of pics from the 27th. Things were going great and my son (age 3.5 at the time) was learning everything right along with me. Its amazing how such a young mind can so easily pick up all that information and remeber it. He would say things to our friends that came to visit like "were not going to eat these Tilapia, were going to eat their babies"... Yeah that one was my fault, but that's a different story for a different day. As of March 1st I saw the beans starting to flower again. The chives and dill seemed almost dead and the tomatoes were passing everything up quick. I think by the third I had offered cherry tomato plants to every one I could think of but as there was snow on the ground I couldn't find any takers. Wonder why?
March 1st, it's looking allot like a jungle now :-)

This is one of my favorite pictures I've ever taken. That is my adult, man hand there! These leaves make it look like a childs and yes my friends all think it's my sons hand. That's my hand! It was probably about this time that it really hit me what a huge plant I was about to have, and my newly green thumb couldn't yank such a beauty of the green persuasion...

It's time for our first guessing game. The beans, tomatoes and pumpkin were flowering as of March 1st. Which set fruit first? Please cast your votes now. I'll give the answer tomorrow. The winners get 5 useless points that mean nothing! Yay! Here's a hint my wife suggested... The right answer starts out green but changes color! Good luck everyone! And thanks Dave, I got the idea from you for this game!

Beans!

The answer will be posted in 3 hours! Hurry up with those geusses! Hehe

Ok, I'll bite...
Tomato.

The pumpkins... can I have my points now?

Okay, it's time now to reveal our wining plants, and by proxy our winning guesses!

Royal purple beans FTW! As of march 15th last year we harvested our first of many beans. Dave, you now have 5 useless points! Congrats! Tune in next time for another chance to earn more of those useless points!

The beans kept very productive from mid March through April and my son would hound me for them anytime he saw me climb the ladder and start picking them. The tomatoes and pumpkin never got past flowering. The tomatoes would always drop the flowers and the pumpkin never would produce a single female flower, always male flowers. I went to the hydro store for advice, checked ph, nitrate, nitrite, phosphate, potassium, etc. No matter what I tried none of it made the tomatoes or pumpkin set fruit. The beans though, they just kept on cranking so I was befuddled. Many hours of internet research yielded squat. It would be months before I learned that 5 x 23 watt cfl bulbs for 8 square feet was no where near enough light for the Toms or pumpkins. Never considered it because the beans were out performing any bean plant I had ever tried to grow in my life, by allot! Experts and internet advice can only get you so far, you must actually test it in the real world to see.. We call it trial and error!

One last picture from March 15th. The upper grow beds were very densely grown in and every thing was thriving. I also had planted the bottom beds up finally and was watching that getting going nicely. A picture or two of that next.

: Note the long internode lengths on the tomatoes and smooth leaves, that's the biggest sign that your problem is weak lighting. If only I had known...

The bottom rack is set and going. Cherokee wax beans from the Dollar tree (.25 cents a pack!) Were the first to come up. Green bell peppers were up as were lots of other things. The wax beans choked most stuff out pretty quickly so I'm having a hard time remembering what I planted with that. I did try the dormant kind of Strawberry... $7 completely wasted. They didn't even come up when planted outside... I set up the bottom as planned, special sprayers and drippers and nozzles on the left side and a Dwc settler on the right. It only took about 2 weeks to clog up all the fancy bits completely. Those went into the trash. I know I could have cleaned them but that's not idiot proof or even resistant so into the can they went. I found that the hoses wide open, just going full blast though made the plants very happy.kind of a hobo version of Aeroponics? Because the roots were not in water, but it was constantly flowing down them instead. This brings us into mid-late April.

Chapter 5: Utopia lost...
Time for more exclusive "useless points". This time anyone who guesses correctly gets 50 useless points! Yay! The question is, what was the major thing that happened which caused this system to begin imploding irreversibly? Aside from my lack of experience. It's something outside of my control.
Oh, it isn't zombies... Sorry I'll give the answer tomorrow night, so get your guess on!
Good luck everyone!

Power outage!

Outside of your control? Powdery mildew, but that might be controllable? Ick?