Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey Veeebs, Do you have any other PawPaw trees in the yard? Cos you normallly get either male or female trees that need the other to pollinate. When we used to grow them we had 1 male to every 5--6 females within a couple of metres. You know the better pollinated the fruit, the better it tastes eh? More viable seeds inside mean more flavour!
Axl

Thanks for the kind comments guys - I enjoy getting comments about my system. They are few and far between in this formal area. For some reason people seem to think they are not allowed to comment - or maybe they just dislike me .

EB - yep sunflowers are doing really well, they look so healthy and are all bunched together in about 10cm square.

Axl - the Paw Paw is a bisexual.

great systems growth there!
You could brace the pawpaw with some ropes (3 or 4 to the sides of your GB...)

Not a bad idea AM - will see how the stability is as time goes on.

If the ropes are tied to the growbed they might harm your grow bed in a big wind. If you can ground anchor the ropes outside the growbed that would be great.

got any nat gas pipelines close by?

Steve, you are too subtle for me; what about natural gas? As it happens my furnaces in house/shop/AP are natural gas and all high efficiency.

As an aside, we have the main gas pipe running so close to our property they provide an emergency evacuation plan to us (no extra charge)

Steve, you would not be suggesting "borrowing" a little with a saddle clamp

DB, Steve was referring to This Post

If you've got gas nearby and have problems with heating in winter...

Then have a read of this link to some excellent step by step plans for a ... Natural Gas Heated Aquaponics Growbed Setup ....

Thanks Rupert.

O.K. Steve, I get it now

Nice article on AP with natural gas, thanks Rupert.

adds new meaning to "greenhouse gas"

ems, greenhouse gas

ems, just noticed your tag line(signature). Could not get the hang of doing it wrong at my employer because they truely left no option....good bye. Formed my own company and refuse to do anything I can not do right. I make a lot less, but smile a lot more!

Tonight I went out to have a look at my fish under a hallogen and couldn't help but want to catch and weigh one. Even at night the buggers are really hard to catch. I netted (one by one) 3 fish in total. I wasn't able to get the largest of the fish, but got a fair variation. Here they are along with their weights. The container I put them in has a diameter of 28cm.

Enjoy - I know they didn't. I now know why we would want to purge the fish. A couple of the did poos when I netted them. The poo smells nearly as bad as chicken shit . My fingers still smell even after washing them.

This has shown that the fish are definitelly now plate size and has confirmed that I was underestimating their size. I expect that the biggest one would be 600+ grams.

I am very happy with the growth I have achieved since getting the fish in August 2006 - particularly given that for much of the time I didn't feed them a proper amount because I was still working on building a system that would sustain them properly.

I am all but resigned to waiting until next season now to get my next batch and to use the winter period to build and cycle my you beut big system. Can't wait to grow out my first batch in the big system, no reason why I couldn't get to at least 750 grams in 9 months I reckon.

BTW the fish looked really healthy - I hope the catching, weighing and photography was not too much of an ordeal for them. The buggers flapped for quite a while before they would stay still enough to be weighed.

very nice

so within about a 7cm length differential (fish #1 = 28cm, #2 = 30cm , #3 = 35cm) there is a 130g weight differential (#1 = 370g, #2 = 471g, #3 = 502g)

That last 7cm gets them big huh