Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I was referring to the height of your grow beds...

It also depends on what you are growing. For lettuce I want a height of 1m or even 1.1m. For toms I want them at ground level.

I would definitely add some more support for the pond, maybe some star pickets hammered into the sand and down into the ground below.
I'd hate to see it collapse.
Love the idea hope it all works out.
Cheers
Ben

Welcome to the forums! Glad to see your high motivation. :-)

As others suggested, re-enforcing the walls of your fish tank would be a good idea. Over time they may begin to bow outward and you don't want to have to drain your tank and make corrections you should have done during initial construction, a humbling experience. Driving stakes down through the voids in the blocks would probably be the easiest way. On that note, you may want to brace up that span of 3 barrels. That will probably sag once you get rocks and water in there.

If you have all of your barrels at the same height, there is a way you could link all of them together via their individual drains. This could also be done for each row or the whole lot. Tie the drains together and then link it to a vertical barrel which also shares the same height. The vertical barrel will be the place for your siphon. When the water level reaches max in all of the barrels, the siphon will kick in and drain them all at once. After the barrels drain the siphon resets for the next cycle. I think if you Google "Olomana Gardens" they might have an explanation.

in relation to the FT wall, the bottom course will probably be ok with the dirt around it however the middle blocks will have about 27kg or 60lbs pushing outwards on each block when the tank is full.

I saw some steel stakes did you plan on driving them into the blocks?

Wow, I'm excited to see so many responses and suggestions! I hope you keep them coming!


I noticed a lot of you mentioned about strengthening the FT wall. Originally, I had planned to drive metal stakes through the voids, but since I didn't have them at the time I opted not to. But I have been thinking about adding some reinforcement, and with all your suggestions I think it would be a wise move. So I plan on doing that soon.

As Slowboat pointed out I do have some steel stakes now and I was planning on using those to give the grow beds a little reinforcement from rocking back and forth. I'll probably use them to reinforce the FT wall first.


Also, I based the grow bed's height on the idea that the water would have to use gravity and flow "down hill" back to the pond. The current height of them also may not be that uncomfortable, but I will have a second look at it and see if I can lower them a bit.

Thanks again for all the responses! I hope to do some more work on the system soon, now that my summer classes are over and I have a few weeks before fall classes start.