Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Thanks Brian. Chewing fingernails at the moment waiting for finance to be approved...

Pruning the ornamental grapevine on the pergola always results in me making more garden art, which does slow down the whole pruning process


I picked up some barbed wire from a friend, and wanted to try something different to the barbed wire balls I usually make...

Started the trout on the floating 7mm spectra pellets today. There was lots of splashing, so I couldn't peer in to see if they were all getting their fair share.

Love your art work!!!

Wish I had time to create but working & the family's sporting addiction takes up my life. One day......

Are they Welsummers Joc? We have 3 of them left, and they haven't laid an egg between them this year, although they are getting on a bit. Actually, the few dozen other chooks arent laying many eggs at this time of year either, but they all still want lot to eat lots of expensive organic grain mix.

Hi Gordon They are gold legbars, a true breeding cross between leghorn and barred plymouth rock developed in the 1930s to give sexlinked chicks for easy sorting of the boys from the girls. Good foragers and easy on the feed, inquisitve but not lapchooks, and they can fly! In the last couple of weeks there are lots of happy folks on the local poultry forum as their freeloading chooks are coming back on the lay. 2 out of my 5 have started and the others are checking out the nesting boxes. Its the first time I've had chooks.
I love growing and raising my own food

I hope 'one day' comes soon for you Karen. It has been rejuvinating, enlightening and revolutionary being on extended long service leave to pursue my whims and fancies away from the daily grind.
Its resulted in a major change in our lives and a delightful future to work towards at our new property.

Finance has been approved

Excellent news

Awesome!

Yes, your artwork is splendid. We're on a ranch basically surrounded by barbed wire, I can tell you it never looked so pleasing. Congratulations on the financing! !

Thanks for all the kind words about our new property. Down the track I will have some serious planning to do and questions to ask of the forum.

Meanwhile, here is a super slo mo clip of my rainbow trout feeding this afternoon - floating pellets sure make for some exciting and wet feeds!

Well done Joc,

What variety are your strawberries? All mine seem to hate the 1ppt salt and have turned up their toes.

Would be nice to have a partially salt tolerant variety to grow.

Hi Continuum, the Hokowase were not happy with the salt, but it maybe that they are not happy with winter as the ones I have in pots are also looking a bit bronzed off and crispy around the edges. The alpine strawberries seemed to be okay, they were runners from ones naturalised through my garden. Temptation seem to be doing well. A pink flowering strawberry (no variety name) that I picked up from the Melbourne Flower Show is doing really well and showed no signs of stress and is flowering like mad (in the photo above). A bunch of runners I got from a friend (no idea what variety) are doing okay with some flowering now, but I lost a few as I think the runners rotted as I put them too deep in the bird netting to hold them in since they didn't have many roots.

I have been doing some water changes to drop my nitrates back to a sensible level (yesterday a 1 in 5 dilution gave a result of 80ppm ). This will also drop the salt level, so I will not add any more for a bit until I can get an accurate measurement of EC or salinity. My water change was a bit bigger than I thought because I left the hose on in the ST and overflowed it . I also added some woodash liquor to raise the pH a bit as it was bottomed out at 6 (or below ) - I haven't been checking much lately. The trout registered their protest by refusing to come to the surface to eat. Hopefully they will settle down tonight and be very hungry tomorrow.

beautiful slo-mo feeding frenzy

Hey Joc, the dolomite you are using, is that Searle's by any chance? I added 55g of it to my large system today, but the plastic bag was decomposing, having been in the sun too long, so I couldn't check ingredients. After I'd added it, I looked it up online and the MSDS tells me it is 10% secret ingredients- I'm hoping the secret ingredients are fish friendly!

Congrats, that is a very nice looking place.

I used your advice on the towers, we just have square down pipe, but it works really good. I will built a tower system for our school project.

Thanks again.