Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Yes Charlie, have a few bags of clay balls coming... if i find they are too light then i'll throw in scoria and if then still i might use soil as i have filter pads in the bottom of each pot to stop the balls blocking the holes

we got pretty busy yesterday... didn't seem like much but it was very time consuming...

After spending some time with a new supplier and then installing a small barrel system for a new customer i finally got around to working on my vertical wall...

And this is what we came up with... the vertical wall is fully plumbed. we had to cut out 100 bits of plastic to fit inside a larger drain that we didn't want to use. silicone the plastic in and put them all in place... IBC scraps hurt after a while of cutting them with tin snips...lol

then once dry we put the bottom row in and plumbed them in... 13mm poly pipe to a common 19mm poly pipe with three drains into the sump twenty times over!!




13mm poly elbowed (is that even a word) in behind the shade cloth wall



13mm poly from the wall into common 19mm poly pipe



and one of the three drains back to the sump

once the bottom row was sorted i could start installing the remaining 80 pots, fill them with washed clay balls (my wife and kids washed them ) and finally plant out the strawberries, thyme, and stupid amounts of various pansies!!!

(ignore the sloppy pipe work. i ran out of saddles and also it will all be covered by the seats once they are installed.)

the next thing to do is plumb up the float valve from the water tank, rough in cables for lights and backup aeration units, build the seats, the fish tank window and the fish tank lid... and i have trout coming on saturday!!!

enjoy!

I'm toying with a similar concept and was thinking, as I'm working in stone that I'd put a flagstone splash sill under the vertical garden diverting any overflow back to the FT

are these custom buckets? They look pretty specific with the plumbing in the bottom. Stunning system

Ive seen them in Masters. (kinda like a hardware store)

Those buckets look really good.

That would have been very time consuming & fiddly work. Well done, it looks great!

I really like that wall. Can't wait to see those plants with a little more growth on them.

Outstanding job!

Great work IceMan - what a productive and beautiful place you have created

Don't knock the pansies, they are pretty, they make you smile when you see their happy faces, and they help feed the beneficial insects that pollinate fruits and assassinate pests

I look forward to seeing more photos as you complete the system and the plants mature.

I look forward to seeing photos of your system if you build it

they aren't custom buckets, they are twenty vertical kits that have five romovable pots in each, they can be mounted vertically or horizontally and all click together

the first couple came from Aldi but when i couldn't find anymore i contacted the distributor directly and finished off the wall.

apparently they have a newer model coming in soon and i am looking forward to seeing that one.

thanks, they worked out better than i thought.





Yes it has been quite fiddly and very time consuming but its been well worth it

we can't wait for it to really start kicking off, lots of green leaves, red strawberries and mixed coloured flowers too




Thanks, its slowly coming together,

pansies are my favourite flower, massively underrated flower... the white ones act as a deterrent to the white cabbage moth.

I never thought of planting a white pansy in with the brassicas, what a great idea. I spent ages cutting out butterfly shapes from white icecream tub lids and stringing them up on fishing line. The caterpillar load was greatly reduced but not eliminated. For those out there wondering what we are talking about, the white cabbage butterfly prefers to lay eggs where there is less competition, so if they see another 'butterfly' already there, they will move on to a less crowded area.