Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

The weather hasn't been too hot lately, so the AP water has been in a comfy range for the Murray Cod.




They are still behaving a bit odd, not coming up to me when I feed them, and dashing around the tank at high speed.
The plants continue to grow well, I've been eating heaps of strawberries and beans lately. Normally in the dirt garden the strawberries would be finished by now, but they are producing as many as ever. Lots of tomatoes are developing on the plants, and the same with the capsicums, a few of which are ready to pick now.

More not too hot weather, plus a few days of rain has kept the system water temperature in a good range over the past couple of weeks.



View of the greenhouse 30/12/2014:



The Murray Cod are growing quite quickly at the moment, due to a diet consisting mainly of ox heart. They'll eat a lot more of it than they will of pellets. I haven't done any counting recently to see if any more have been eaten by the big ones.

We ate 3 more of the trout harvested in Dec 2013 a couple of days ago, and they tasted just as good as they did when fresh It appears that they keep perfectly well for at least 12 months in a freezer kept below -18C. There are only about 10 of them left now.... trying to make them last until I can harvest a Murray Cod or 2.

This morning the Murray Cod have disappeared from view- 70mm of rain in torrential downpours in a couple of slow moving thunderstorms around midnight-2am flooded the area and muddy water flowed into the ST, which has since been distributed throughout the system. I don't think it will be too much of a problem, as Murray Cod often encounter turbid conditions naturally, but I do like to keep an eye on them
There were hundreds of nearby lightning strikes, one of which stopped my off-grid system 10 channel data logger, although it appears to be ok now after a re-start. The AP water temperature data logger appears to be ok- one advantage of wireless instead of a 20 m cable run. There were a couple of spectacular showers of sparks from the power pole half way down the drive, but fortunately no chance of a fire starting in the downpour.

Wow Gordon stay safe. Will you end up with silt in yr GBs?

You were lucky mate, happened to me a few years back and it took down my computer and pond pump.

Yea, the mud will no doubt mostly end up in the bottom of the GBs, although I am using bits of polyester insulation batts under the GB outlets to try to catch some of it, the same stuff I use to keep the sun off the top of exposed areas of media. It makes a great filter material for fines.
I have several layers of lightning protection on the electrical circuits, so that was all ok, although I had my main computer, tv, etc unplugged when I saw what was coming. The weather/off-grid monitoring computer was fine, as are the AP electrics.
The driveway is even more washed out than before- and there is lots of mud everywhere, but there will be an excellent crop of blackberries in a couple of weeks
I'm sure there are waterfalls in the gullies over the back of the block but I'm too tired to bother with going over there to look. The continuous and extremely loud thunder meant no sleep until after 3am, I think I need to have a lie down now

The water is still pretty murky, but the fish don't seem concerned. I can see about 20cm into it now, much better than not being able to see past the surface at all a few days ago. For the first time since the mud flood I saw the fish flash as they swam up to get their ox heart pieces this morning.

I can finally see the bottom of the FT again, although only just, under ideal lighting conditions. When feeding, the fish seem larger than when I last had a decent look at them, no doubt due to the over half a kilogram of ox heart they've eaten since the mud flooded in

I'm selling my leftover 2mm starter pellets, see here:
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=23992


I've ordered some Green Lacewings to deal with the white fly, which are becoming far too numerous for my liking, and are now spreading to other plants from the Peruvian Ground Apple, which seems to be WFHQ.

Here's an ant farming some aphids, just before I hit them with a good spray of eco-oil.

Let us know how the lacewings go, I was tempted to buy them myself.

Here's the photo that's meant to be in my posting above.

We already have a few Green Lacewings around, but they are on the outside of the greenhouse, and I don't want to open the FF netting up and let any more undesireables in, such as Qld Fruit Fly, so I'm buying some to introduce on the inside of the GH.

Here's the current White Fly situation:

While I'm at it with the new phone camera, the Banana is powering on, but no sign of any fruit yet:



and deficiency of some sort on the beans that causes leaf necrosis:



Not all the leaves are suffering from it, but it is increasing, so the mostly meat diet of the Cod ATM clearly isn't supplying all the nutrients required by some of the plants.
I doubt it is Potassium, as I am adding KOH flakes every few days, or Calcium as there is still plenty of shell grit in the system, which will be going into solution quite well at ~pH6.3

The strawberries have taken over this bed, and clearly the roots are causing some channelling- the plants near the water inlet have a bit of 'fertiliser burn' around the edges, most of them are ok, but a couple of plants in the middle have a slight deficiency of some kind. I'll be pulling a lot of these out in the next day or 2 anyway, as Red Gauntlet variety do not store at all well, which is forcing me to eat most of them as soon as I pick them I have another variety (name unknown) that supposedly keep a bit better, so will plant some of them.

Strange looking. Did you check for thrips? Looks like typical thrip/spider mite damage on the young leaves, but the progression is something I haven't seen before.

We had a pretty good look for bugs, as I thought mites too, but didn't see any, but that was only on the almost dead leaf- I'll have a good look at the less affected leaf now and see what I find.