Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey EB, a couple of questions...

1. After a few years, what is yout favourtie fish to grow now?
2. What do you do during winter. You said Barra didnt work - what happened and what is your alternatives?
3. What do you use to feed your fish? I want to get a few worm farms going for our school system and we are going to start out with red claw...
Would you ever see yourself having a massive worm farm to feed the fish?
4. How do you connect your growbeds to your sump. I think on your video I saw at Jamies you used plumbing pipe? but how did you connect it all up?

Fantastic system mate and I cant wait till we get our school system up and running.

hi joel, while you're answering questions, I have one too. BTW, I love your system it shows me what's possible.

Q.
How do you stagger purchases of new finglerings to ensure a continuous supply of fish? I understand that it will take at least 12 months before we eat our first fish from our system, but after that I would like to have a continuous supply for the table. Have you worked out a way to do it?

Forest, you will find that the fish grow at amazingly different rates. Mysmallest are still around 150 grams, biggest over 400, and I purchased them as 1 gram fingerlings in September last year with a new unestablished system. Natural selection will help for choosing when to eat the LOL, but a second tank and system is really handy for kick starting your next lot of fingerlings. ie I have 100 silvers waiting to go in my big system, in their own 1000 litre tank with growbed.

I would like to answer in part forest:

Now that Qld members are growing, we should look to combing our orders and purchase at the beginning and the end of the season (Oct/Apr), this would spread the fish sizes

Different growth rates spread out the harvesting also, Monya's barra range from 150 - 500g. ( read Mon's replay above )

Both of these in combination makes continuous supply relatively simple - interested to hear of Joel's opinion (put that in so I wouldn't be accused of going off topic )

1. Favourite fish for me to grow here in Perth are silvers.. This is for a few reasons, firstly they are so tough, and they are omniverous which is great.. I threw a couple of handfulls of azola in yesterday, and they disapeared straight away, they also keep the the tank clean by scraping algae from the sides.. Also they don't mind cooler waters as well as warm water, and they taste alright... Lots of bonuses.... If only they bred easily.

2. See answer 1...

3. Personally I'm not going to have a huge worm farm... I had a guy come here yesterday, he has a dozen worm beds 3m x 1m and he's very keep to set up a system and feed the fish on worms.. I would recommend worms for others, but it's just not for me on a large scale, but that s only a personal thing..

4. Yem, drains are all done using DWV pipe and fittings, this was an easy choice because I use drains in my growbeds and the only pipe work you can attach is DWV. There are minimal fittings on my drains, 1 coupling screwed onto drain fitting, a short piece of verticle pipe, then elbow, then pipe to drain tank, the fittings I siliconed on so theres a little bit of give in them..

5. yep, people have pretty much covered it... Stagger your harvesting... Pull out the large ones over a period of time till there is only a small amount of fish left, then pull them all out and freeze them, and stock with new fish... Or get yourself another system.....

thanks! I've just discovered your second system. I'm leaving the page open for H to see when he comes home.

[quote]I would recommend worms for others, but it's just not for me on a large scale, but that s only a personal thing..[quote]

Why is that EB?

bingo! second system coming up.

I don't have time to do everything

Aquestion ? Should I add worms to my growbeds? Never thought of that!

you can add them, but some people have found worms in there that arrived all by themselves

Yeah, mine came naturally, but I'd probably add a few in a new system, just to be sure....

yeh, i chucked half a doz compost worms in there................and unless the 6 just happen to be where i dig then i'm sure they've multiplied

why worms in grow beds?

they seem to clean up any old roots in the gravel.