Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Last lot of photo spam, just a shot of the carrots. I think I need better foam to hold the seedlings if I'm going to do it again as they didn't stop the sun getting in and turning the tops green. Oh and the fact I drilled holes too high in the pvc pipe didn't help either, lol.

I'm still tempted to give it one more go and see what happens just altering what I do to see if they work a bit better (colour up and grow quicker, etc). And not accidentally break one of them when cleaning off the roots, lol.

While I'm here, I've been pondering what fish to try next now that trout season is almost up.

I really want to expand and add on a half-ibc GB to each system (need the GB space), so I was thinking after I did that, I could reserve one side for trout and maybe Silver Perch and Catfish in the other? The latter would take a couple of years at least to grow out but they do co-habitate don't they?

Now I'm terrible at actually calculating and remembering how much filtration I have in the GB, but I *think* adding a half IBC GB would bring up the filtration to about 750lt or so total for each system. So say it's around that, could I comfortably get away with say 10 silver perch and 10 catfish in one system? And I don't know, maybe 15 trout in the other?

Ah I'm rambling!

20-25 litres rock per fish
750/25=30 fish

That's what I was thinking. And closer to 30lt minimum for poopy fish like trout. I've been going on wet media amount, that's right isn't it?

Initially when I was building the system I just multiplied roughly what the height of the wet media would be by 10, so was going off it being about 200lts wet gravel. Then I realised that the water level would be higher than that given the height of the actual cut IBC, so I was thinking I've got about 230lt or so of wet media. Then I remembered the IBC's aren't square, so I think I've got closer to 270lt of wet media in each system as they are setup at present.

And again I've pretty much done the same with the half-IBC GB's I want to add. Assuming a 50cm height would give 500lt of gravel, but I think it'd be closer to 600lt to the top? So say the water level is closer to the 40cm height, that's 480lt roughly of wet media, plus the existing GB, around 750lt wet.

Argh! I think this says it all:



Lol, it's an insight into how non-functional my zombie brain really is.

Hmm, how about we just ignore those waffles and enjoy these instead:

Your melon is mush
Well when you order silvers online they come in 25x fish lots that should help you make a decision.

Decided to pull the onions and pickle them to free up some GB space, there was way more than I thought which was good. They weren't properly grown but the perfect size for pickling, so all good.





This is the recipe I used, haven't tried it before but it's fairly simple so I can't imagine it'd be bad. I sploshed a bit of red wine vinegar in the mix too just for the hell of it.

*I forgot to add the recipe link...I've heard that it's a helpful thing to do when mentioning websites http://www.sbs.com.au/food/recipes/swee ... led-onions

I took two very poor quality videos of the fish, there are a few fatties in the tanks! Methinks I need to do a taste test very soon...

Tank 1




Tank 2, Mr Vertical is still kicking along!




Wow, they really are terrible vids, lol.

Could it be that being the smaller ones, they were spooked by larger ones and the normal defense... JUMP..

I like your idea of grafting... it could help giving diversity, whilst only having one foot-print in the GB..
Individually, they can take up so much room..

I don't know if you have previously described the process, but can you point to a how to, somewhere..

Peter
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.

..
BTW.. Manky carrots is an issue for us also..
We have started a trial of sinking a shopping bag of pearlite into the media and having the carrots in there..
Dug it into a corner..

We have not seen what the media does to beetroot... we are still on the steep part of the learning curve.. :-)
..
.

EWWW! 41°C outside today, and tomorrow is only going to get worse! Thank dog for air conditioning, lol.

The trout are happy though, water temp sitting just below 21°C, and a friend came to the rescue with a bag of food for them, poor little things must have been starving, lol.

If I can brave the heat I'll have to take some photos of the plant growth, lettuce and tomato's in their mostly and they are going mental, especially the latter.

- 2 C here Azira, if this computer is to be believed. Certainly no danger of overheating while I struggle with the cap of a brew .

Ahh, that makes me feel cooler just thinking about it, lol.

it's a wee bit nippy here as well 7°F -13°C

Note to self: Don't leave things that can get tangled in the pump anywhere near the FT's!

Went out today to feed the fish, took me a second to realise that one of the pumps was off. Turns out the spool of string I left on the GB had somehow managed to be blown into the FT, sink and then the last bit of string get sucked into the pump. Thankfully the pump was fine as were the remaining trout in the tank (turns out there was four not the two or three I thought). Good thing the air pump was going I guess.



Mind you the wind and rain caused a bit more of a problem than a stopped pump:



Bye bye fence! We went out for 45 minutes and came back to that. I'm kind of glad we weren't home to be honest. Lucky I am lazy and hadn't put the chicken coop up there otherwise they'd be mush.

In other news, the tomatoes are growing like crazy, but haven't ripened yet. I need to get off my rear end and tidy the plants up though, they are mostly overgrown and flopping everywhere!

fence is a mess but the tommies look good, any drama with bugs getting into them?