Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

nice

Did you ever figure out what happened to your pumpkin back in February?

Nope - happened to plenty more, my gut feel is it is potassium related. Had one that was up ion the air on a trelllis die off after growing for about a month so not fungal.

Hi Matt,

How did you make those shade houses? has a good shape that i think will fit in my yard better than a standard hoop house.

Used 1.8m star pickets driven 0.6m into the ground, then cut the lengths of 50mm rural poly pipe so that when they were pulled a fair way down the pickets, the top would start to flatten out.

One is now a greenhouse.... I'll get some pics when it stops raining.

When our squash plants lose fruit like that it is usually a squash borer problem (and by usually I mean always, and by when I mean every year).

Interesting - no borer was obvious in the last one- I cut it open to check the insides - had lots of immature seds and minimal flesh around them.

The borers live in the stem, sucking up all the nutrition.

Is that the stem of the pumpkin itself or the main plant stem? Will have a closer look. Did have an egg plant stem borer that ate the stems though the frass was obvious with that type.

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Harvested some Galangal yesterday.



got plenty more to replant/give away at local seed exchange:



and a bit to eat - does anyone know best way to store it? thinking in sand maybe?



Though will put it in a soil bed as it takes up too much room and time in AP beds.

Never heard of it, whats it taste like Matty?

its a type of ginger - used a lot in thai cooking - I'd say a mix of pungent and bitter

We use it a lot in our cooking your description of the taste is about right,its signature dish for me is the Thai soup Tom Yam Gung, or hot sweet spicy prawns,there is a lot of galanga lemon grass and kaffir lime leaves,you can also do it with fish, Tom yam bla it is absolutely superb.

I am a yank so if I flip flop between metric and English units please forgive.

26 degrees should not be a problem. That is right in the temperature window where the fish should be comfortable. Also It should not cause a problem with oxygen loss. If all the rest of the water chemistry was in line, that is indeed a strange die-off. I would need to pound down a few strong ales if I found that mess.

I agree that they should have been ok to eat.
I was using an old borrowed pond pump originally. It failed and I wasn't aware of the failure for at least 12 hours. My 1250L FT which holds 25 Tilapia and 25 pond goldfish suffered no ill effects. I do have a larger aquarium air pump providing constant aeration through a 30cm long airstone.

Plus all my water that flows into sump, FT and GB drop from a height so it gets aerated that way, the drain out of my ft into my SW filter has a venturi valve to I get aeration there, flow from the SW filter into the sump is also venturi so I get aeration there.

Insect infestation was one reason I wanted to use a greenhouse. I've grown vegetables conventionally in a greenhouse and the bugs were very controllable and were not too varied. Aphids were the worst culprit. I released 150 ladybugs in the greenhouse, in 2 weeks I did not see any more aphids. And the ladybugs controlled whatever else happened to be living in the greenhouse.

My FT will be inside the greenhouse. I am going to get a couple of those silver reflective car windshield sun shields, push them between the IBC tank frame and plastic container, that should stop the sun from playing havoc with the environment in the FT.

I have a friend that put a vertical "water cooling" feature in for his swimming pool.
He rented a tree planting auger, $80usd for a half a day. It was gas powered, hydraulic and drilled a 48 inch deep, 36inch diameter hole.

He dug 4 of those holes in less than 2 hours, returned the machine for half the price refunded.
He made the holes a little deeper with a post hole digger.
Then used 1/2" pvc fastened head to tail with 90 degree fittings. Configured that way he got about 80 feet of 1/2" pvc in each hole. He backfilled with the dirt that was dug out. He plumbed it putting 1/2" ball valves so that he could run his water through one, or two, or three, or all four of the "heat exchangers". They performed well. In the worst summer heat where the pool water temperature got to 31 degrees, his cooling system would drop the pool temp by 10 degrees in one day. This pool was 50,000L.

Since they are vertical they do not have a big foot print.

Just reading back though this thread and notice you never did get to the bottom of this:



Looks like blossom end rot, which my horticulturist wife has previously told me is ultimately due to a lack of Calcium, made worse if the plant suffers wet and dry periods, although that aggravating factor is unlikely in AP.