Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Thank you, boss & coachchris!

I am indeed a salvagemonger, which garners me some rather odd looks from time to time here in the financial software world ("Dude, WHAT is that in your trailer???"). Unfortunately it also makes me something of a bad ambassador for aquaponics in general to the rest of my immediate family, who are quite tired of living in a suburban junkyard.

Which is a roundabout way of saying my 1000-gallon tank is still available for free to whoever wants it.

Update: My 1000-gallon tank is now pledged to LincTex, we just have to get our schedules to match so I can actually give it to him.

Thank you all very much, and please consider this tank "taken" even though at the moment it is still in my yard. That's not a complaint, by the way, just the current situation.

Think of yourself as a borderline counterculture icon or perhaps an under-appreciated visionary for recycling waste

It's that time of year again... Time to re-skin the Frisco greenhouse!

I honestly don't know if I'm going to get the Dallas one done in time this year, but since there's living fish in the Frisco one, it takes top priority.

As you might expect, I've made numerous modifications, the main one being moving the chicken coop inside of it, and I've used trampoline parts to create a near-full-circle "chicken yard" extension on their end. I've also thrown an old swing frame in there to give them some additional volume before the sheeting comes down to the ground.

The main non-avian ramification of all this is that I've got to figure out where to re-position my wood-burning stove to, since the coop now sits where I had it last winter. Please note that while you really can't make it out in the pictures above, I'm using part of the Cinemark movie theater screen as a shade over the chickens, since at the moment it is getting too cold for the fish at night, but is still way too hot for the chickens during the day without shade and the plastic sides rolled up.

It should be obvious that I've installed none of the batting-cage netting as of yet, but I do intend to. My daughter and I had to stretch the sheeting over the frames TWICE this weekend before I got it anchored down, thanks to the wind. The netting should give it some real strength and increased weather resistence, or so I hope.

Chicken side:





Aquaponics side:







Yes, my yard looks like an absolute junk-pile. My HOA hates me. Too bad!

I am in the process of turning that square yellow catchment tank into a growbed.

In addition to the wood-burning stove, I've got to figure out what to do with the two IBCs that contain catfish. If I can somehow segment an IBC into two parts (and a large but fine/closely woven net might do the trick), then I can probably just use a single one for catfish, but I don't want to mix the large guys in with the babies.

Finally, I can report that my 6-month-old chickens have started laying, the Tilapia are still growing, and thanks to the power of unplanned impulse buying, we added three new (3-day-old) chickens to the lot.

The new ones are Silkies, and we probably won't keep them all because these are "straight run", meaning we have no idea what gender they are, and should any grow up to be roosters then they'll have to go.

But in the meantime, here are Cream Puff, Topsy-Toffee, and Stormageddon:

Very entertaining thread, got some good laughs out of it.

I lost in one night 22 ducks, due to the large forest Owl, they get a wing span of 6 feet. They dive bombed through the plastic netting and than made it with the ducks back out, through the wholes. I figure they must have had offsprings as help.. I found head less ducks all over the Ranch, half eaten or just killed.
They were black Runners.
I built a fortress for the next, but some how a Weasel got in, made a huge mess, but got a beating by Mr. Goose, he left a lot of blood and bloody tracks on his retreat. Mr Goose did not make it. So 4 runners left and Mrs Goose. Tusnelda and the 4 stooges.

I plan for next year to use the 1200 gallon Tusnelda and the 4 stooges pond for tusnelda4stoogeponics system.
Runners are egg layers, very tasty, 2 over easy and some sausage and fresh bread, yummy, full for the day.

22 ducks in one night is a HUGE loss! Gnoib, you have my sympathies!

Of my four laying-age chickens, I think one is doing all the work. The Speckled Sussex "Parrot" has laid four eggs a day for the last couple of days - which I didn't even know was possible - while the Buff Orpingtons haven't laid a thing.

I'm looking forward to having a Tilapia harvest soon, but I'd love to get another mass hatching caught and safely into their own aquarium first.

Years ago, after coyotes tore into my chicken - turkey coop, I built what I proudly called Fort TurKen. Then I found a king snake stuck in the fence with a marble egg in its gut. I had placed marble eggs in the roosts to help the hens learn to set. Silly snake couldn't crush it. That was an ordeal, getting the snake out of the chicken wire without harming it as King snakes are very good snakes. Sheesh, I thought I was ahead in the battles, when a bear tore through the steel hog fencing like it wasn't even there. It was then I decided, they win, I'm not going to be able to keep poultry up here in the mountains. This is the land of the wild things. Now we built our new home further up the hill at the forest edge. Game trails everywhere up here. When we first settled in, our dogs couldn't decide which side of the house had more threats. Some nights the three of them are on separate sides barking, like "We're surrounded!!"

Sounds like up in the mountains you'd have to raise livestock inside abandoned silver mines or the like.
Sadly, but not surprisingly, that's not an option here in the general Dallas area.

But I'd love to move to the mountains one day.

Or Bora Bora (duh!) but that's another thread for another day.

Yes that was a mayor hit. Same day I had 6 Deputies at my place when I got home to clean the mess up and got arrest twice within 45 minutes, I think that is a county record, , that Mexican stand off lasted for 2 hours, it was over tress passing cows and the owner not wanting to pay the damage and the Deputies being his roping buddies.
The trees yellowed for ten miles, because of my mastery of 4 languages and their exquisite expressions........
It got really interesting, when I asked them to finally get a real cop up here and the cuffs came out again, but finally they called the State Trooper that lives up here and the thing was solved in 5 minutes. I got my damage payed and Mr Rancher took his cows home and I cleaned up the mess.
That was a day for a beer and a shot of whisky and to be remembered.

That indeed sounds like a day for the record books!

Two of the baby chicks died in the night, having apparently run out of water. Only Stormageddon survived.

A cotton towel got knocked into their water bowl (I have no idea how, since they're too small to have kicked it there), but alas that wicked the bowl dry. My 11-year-old was crushed, since she was caring for them in her room. We managed to keep the news from my 5-year-old however, so after I dropped my kids off at school nearly an hour early this morning, I raced back up to McKinney and was at the farm store when they opened at 8AM.

And of course I bought two replacements!

The new chicks are all from the same hatching as the deceased ones, so Cream Puff 2.0 looks identical to its predecessor. However Topsy-Toffee 2.0, although still brown, looks considerably different. Not sure how I'm going to explain that to my youngest kid. I'm hoping she doesn't notice, and I'll probably not get my way about that...

Recladding the Frisco greenhouse continues, but has been slowed by our torrential rains.



I've got a single layer of plastic on, but I intend to put on a second layer and then the netting to hold it all in place. And I still have to rig a better door.

This picture doesn't show the depth very well at all, but it is 11-ish feet from front to back looking straight in from this angle.

As you can see, I've got the fish on one side and the chickens on another. Well, we've just scored a rabbit hutch from a neighbor because we've decided to start adding rabbits to the household mix. I'm not completely sure where I'm going to locate the hutch (probably smack in the middle - might have to move the garbage cans which currently hold chicken and fish food).

It is a lovely hutch, and we're probably going to stain it with a light redwood stain.



I also got a "new" aquarium (the neighbors were going to throw it away) which I think will make a nice tilapia brood tank once we get it clean.



On the down-side, the rain made my in-ground sump tank collapse and run almost dry, BUT apparently there was enough water left that for once it didn't kill my fish. I quickly ran a bunch of water into the sump, saw that seemingly everyone survived, and now just need to find the time to dig out around it so the water pressure will push the walls back out to the normal volume.

More as it happens!

Hay I just got back around to catching up on your thread.

In ground sumps can be dangerous in wet climates. I generally make mine so that the water level normally doesn't dip much below the ground level, and then my systems are out under the open sky so when it rains here, my sump stays full so less danger of it floating up or collapsing in.

You mentioned at some point integrating the chickens with the aquaponics. I would personally advise against letting any warm blooded animal poop in an aquaponics system that you eat things like lettuce out of. Think of it kinda like letting them poop in your salad bowl. All warm blooded animal poo should really be composted properly or at least aged 4 months or more before growing something like salad greens in it. This is due to pathogens like salmonella and e. coli.
I know the people at Garden Pool put their chickens over the pool but I personally wouldn't recommend that.

I've come around to completely agreeing with you on this, which is largely why I gave up my plans to turn my 1000-gallon tank into a chicken coop (I would have had a "constant flush" going on through its base), and instead I gave it away to get the darn thing out of my yard.

Also - and this is a happy accident because I can't claim to have planned this - the "chicken side" of my greenhouse is downhill from my fish side, and is low enough that we're just never going to get a big enough flood for water running through the chicken-yard to make it into the sump tank.

If I end up putting the rabbit hutch where I'm thinking about, then the situation would still be the same, i.e. the base of the hutch would be downhill from the sump tank, with pretty much zero chance of rabbit waste falling into the aquaponics system just by happenstance.

You're right about Garden Pool - I just hope those guys wash their greens very, very well!

Thanks!

You might want to set up worm bins or a composing method under the bunnies for use in the dirt garden, same for chickens. Compost is high value!