Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Here is an interesting picture. Same plants 9 days of growth now that my fish are eating good.

June 21


June 30

Plant pictures. I have a small watermelon and the cucumbers plants are about 2’ ½ foot high.

Thanks for the progress pics Mark

The plants are doing very well. The cucumbers and the watermelon are 4’ tall. The broccoli is doing great.
I hope the broccoli heads start soon.

We were away for the weekend the fish were happy to see me come home and feed them.

This is fun growing all this stuff but it will be so nice to be growing all this over the winter.

Looking good!

When I was young I could only grow cactus.

My wife had a garden before but I really did not participate.

When I was young my parents had a huge garden mostly weeds that’s how I spend most of my summer weeding I never want to touch a garden again ever.

So this is my first garden and no weeds not one.

It is just crazy how fast everything is growing.

Awesome system Mark. I'm just up the road from you (just north of Shelby, NC) so I'm really looking forward to seeing how well your greenhouse works.

true this. Ours isn't done yet, but already I'm not panicing about Summer being halfway through. At least for kale and collards and trout

Thanks.
I can’t wait to get to the greenhouse started. I have my own business and I am very covered up right now so it will be a little while before I start.


When I get the back beds DWC done I would like to have some lettuce being ready all the time so we can eat more salads.
Hopefully that will work out in hot summer it might be harder to grow lettuce. But I should be able to shade some of that to make it work.
I got my new plant hangers in the mail today and put some of them up.

The netting we had up was slowing down the plant growth. The cucumber that was on the cattle panel was 4’+ and the one that was on the netting was less than 2’ high. I got rid of all the netting. I will see how they do now.

We had a bad storm come through. Lots of Lighting and strong wind. I was able to get the chickens in the barn but the lighting was too bad to take the roof covering off the fish tank. It blew off and ripped but it is still usable the frame stayed stable. I think a couple of the tomatoes may not make it. But overall we made out pretty good for how bad the storm was.


We have some more cucumbers good thing my boy the big cucumbers eaters are coming back home today.

One of my broccoli is getting spots on it. It is the center one there is one on each side of it that are doing very well and have heads starting.
Should I remove these bad looking leafs or just let it grow. Do you what issue is has?
Iron is 2.3 ppm
I add Epson salt 3 tables spoons each week.
Nitrates 60
PH 7.0
Ammonia.0 ppm
Nitrite 0 ppm

I would remove the leaves. I think this is happening because of poor air circulation and could be bacterial from water standing on the leaves encouraging growth but there is another possibility. You mentioned that you are adding Epsom salts and I think this might be starting to cause problems with potassium since it competes with magnesium for uptake by the plants. The way the margins are dying back is what makes me think this is going on. Looks great otherwise.

Thanks for the info. Since this plant is between to others and two climbing plants it is not getting much air flow. We have had very little rain so not much standing water on them.

Is there a test to know in you need to add magnesium?
I just ordered Red Sea Magnesium Pro Test Kit - 100 Tests.