Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi everybody!

After several months of researching and collecting material, last Friday I finally put together an aquaponic system following the tutorial I found here "The IBC of aquaponics" !

There is a webpage and forum in Spanish (Acuaponia en acción) but unfortunately it seems to be dead...

Thank you very much for all the information, tutorials, and forum activity!

I will posts pictures and a description of the system in a few weeks (as plants grow)!

Welcome to the forum CM .

Thanks Scotty for the welcome message!

Everything is going well considering it is not the best season (not much sun!).

Plants began to show an obvious iron deficiency so I am adding Iron chelate.

I connected the water hose (which was discharging directly into teh GB) to a perforated pipe, much better.

I have tried different kinds of locally available food for the fish:

Compost worm, pill bugs (Armadillidae), fish scraps and duckweed.

There is a nice coat of biofilm in the tank but water remains clear.

I tried to post a picture from my desktop but it does no seem to work.. does the image need to be already on internet? (seems like)

What type of fish are you growing?

The image doesn't have to be on the Internet CM. You're probably running into the image size restrictions of the forum. Here is a link to a tutorial on posting images to the forum that was written by one of the members and might help -

http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=21754

Cheers

Thanks for the tutorial!

I am now running the system on goldfish. My idea is to keep them during the winter and then substitute them with tilapia or other edible fish.

In one of our irrigation water tanks (400 m3) I have introduced royal carp of breeding size. If it works, it might become a source of carp fingerlings for other systems. But carp has quite a bad gastronomic reputation around here.

You might also be able to run without any fish if that's easier for you. The plants don't grow much during the Winter around here - perhaps you'll have enough build up of nutrients that you won't need fish. A number of people use Blood and Bone (liquid or meal) to keep their systems running well with light or no fish loads. You might want to look at this or similar ideas to carry the system through winter.

Can't say I've heard many positive comments about carp as food around here either. I haven't tried it

The image uploading problem was just not using the full editor!

So this was the system at the beginning, 1 month ago.

Now the lettuce is much bigger and 1 tomato is starting to flower!
Also the bottom and sides of the fish tank are covered in biofilm.

I had to add a pipe with small holes at the end of the hose so that water would fall gently into the GB.

This is just the test, in this small system I would to grow strawberries which are really hard to grow in our garden (watering and weeding).