Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Could you let me know how much it costs to check NPK values. I can not yet find a NPK tester here. Heck I can't find any water testers yet. Just on the net. I would like to buy local if I could. I can not find any HP or AP stores either. The market is Zero so far.

Do you have any past NPK values that you have from the past that you can share with me. Based on that same 7,000 liters.

I am trying my best to learn what this is all about and how to play with these numbers with natural items that really work and leave the fish alone.

I do believe that most rain water is acidic to start with down in the 5s Ph Is that what you start with 5+Ph or is your system changing it down.

This paragraph is in question: For people to drink 5+Ph might/is be a little weak for our immune system. 7+ is better for us. For a person one can check their saliva, sweat or pee with simple paper strips. Every one I "knew" who had cancer had a very low body Ph level. It would be up to all who read this to either look into that or just blow it off as a joke. One needs to look into the Ph of cancer cells/tumors that were removed from people. Most down in the 3 to 5 Ph range. IMO if you only drink rain water it may create a problem in the future. We need good 7+ Mineral water.

Worm casting tea.
I hear it's a 4-8-4 deal. I use it on all my plants and even put it in my AP unit because it contains nitrifying bacteria in it to start that process faster.
Call me a liar, but my system was converting ammonia to sufficient nitrates in just 3 days.
I would forget about the N and focus on P and K.

Hmmmm
I'll make a formula using wood ash and bbq sauce and let you know how it goes.

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Okay, i took the remnants in a bbq sauce container and added a tablespoon...

Cops just showed up next door and left without any tweakers. What do I pay them for?

Anyways... Tablespoon of wood and weed ash (not marijuana, though that wouldn't be far fetched, lol)

Added water and tested on half my least important crop. popcorn. Will post updates every 24 hrs or so.

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Hmm I should also test on fish.

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@wildbillnye: wow bbq sauce! now if you can add some extra spices the fish could be ready right out of the tank, lol


I see that most any ash is very high in K. Bananas are local for me and I would need to dry them out and burn them to ash. I can only judge by eye all of these values. When the ammonia gets high in the FT the color of the water changes from clear to a slight yellow. Since I have been doing more water changes on the FT I have not had this problem show up.

I would think that if you had the right mix of NPK and plant ratios, converting the ammonia should be very fast. 3 days is a long time with many passes at the plants. Maybe if you had 2/3rds more plants it would remove it in one day. It is like doing a high wire act at times.

fish poo of 5-2-2 added to your castings of 4-8-4 makes 9-10-6 which looks like a good mix to me. Maybe bring the K up a few more points with some seaweed or ash. Standard seaweed should be 5K and would round it out nice. I will try seaweed when I get it. We just need to be careful not to add anything that shut the NPK absorption uptake to the plants. There is a name for that word.

Hum, worm casting tea, sounds like something they might even drink here. I will have to ask the herbal store if they sell the castings. Maybe they have silk worm castings. I have had some kind of silkworm tea years ago.

No you don't want to drink worm casting tea, You'll get sick! Maybe worse. And I thought silk worms were a larvae of some sort. Do they even poop or are they like kim jung un?

Well, when I add anything to my AP unit I do so in conservative ammounts. The bbq sauce contains a bunch of macronutrients but also sugar, so may not be safe for AP. However, woodash will increase ph so bbq sauce counters that, while providing micronutrients that nobody knows that plants like.

As for finding castings, go where there are constantly redworms. The ground should be littered with castings.
I had a leaky spigot on the side of my house for over 2 years. Now that area is covered in 4 inches of dead grass and worm poop.

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We did go out to the forest area one day looking for any worms and came back empty handed. I have seen stuff like Earth worms but they are very rare. Never seen a red worm. back at home, every shovel break would give you worms. There are a lot of ants out there and they build pretty big mounds. Maybe they do the soil breakup instead of the worms. The ants here just make round mounds, No ant hills. Maybe because of the amount of rain we get. Rats, mice and other ground animals also chew into the forest floor. I have found casings from the giant wasps. Maybe for the silkworm tea they use the actual larva or what ever they get left over once they remove the silk outer shell. This needs hands on research.

Redworm is just a smallish brownish eartworm. Nighcrawler castings are good too but harder to find let alone produce

I've tried alot of compost tea formulas, and worm poop seems to works best for me.

When adding stuff to an AP system to get a certain NPK value wouldn't a 1-1-1 be best for the fish, as long as the water circulates through roots and the levels are balanced, as in self regulating?

I would supplement P and K into the fish food and let the bacteria break down ammonia into nitrites then nitrates for N. I just realized I'm going to have to do 3/4 water changes untill my plants are able to take on all the nitrates.

My next system will have the same issue.



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The values of NPK are in percentages not ppm so 1% of a million should be 10,000 ppm. This is where it gets confusing for me so far. All NPK ferts need to be watered down a lot to reach safe limits. What I need is a NPK chart in ppm which I have not found yet.

No worms here so far, just ants.

I see. So you need a balanced NPK fertilizer to feed the plants before adding fish. Now that's tricky, but if you can do it the plants will be able to keep up with the nitrates.

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well I would like that fertilizer to be available all the time if I could and adjust it for some plants.. So I still need to find a AP ppm chart . No luck so far.

Found this on Google, it's for hydroponics so wouldn't use any of the "ingredients" in AP without research but it shows the elements needed in ppm.

Those concentrations will vary depending on the plant species being grown so don't get too attached to them. The other thing is that in AP nutrients are continually being released as organic material breaks down so you can have a very low measured level for something and still the plants are getting what they need (I think it's better to show a little though) .

This is the best chart so far. Thank You very much. I can't find one from here. Seems on Google, one can find anything. And it is banned here.

I will print it out and use it as a starter guide. I am looking into 8-8-8 now or maybe even 8-8-12

As you can see the N is way over the 80ppm AP people use. And from what little I understand so far they say that Nitrates don't harm the fish. The Ammonia and nitrites are the fish killers. read above and see that mark d w has his N running at 400 to 700 ppm and doing it for a long time with no problems.

So I don't Know where this 80ppm comes from. maybe someone started an AP rumor and it has stayed on forever and it is bogus. It would not be the first time people did that to hold onto secrets to keep an advantage.

Still confused but working thru it........If I could get a N measuring kit I would take a 10 liter tank and keep upping the N value until the fish died. I am thinking it will survive in more then 10,000ppm.

I could be 100% wrong on the next item but maybe the kits are a lie. They are not ppm but closer to ppthousand. It would not be the first time gages or tests are marked wrong. To have 80ppm or 8milligrams per liter of water of anything is so close to nothing I would not even bother to measure it. 0.00008% is what? Less then a fish fart. I feed my fish 2 grams of food, 3 times a day. 6 grams of food is equal to 6,000 mg of food or 6,000ppm of fish food alone if in a liter of water. And 100Nppm will damage fish? That 2 grams was about 40 pellets of food. So 100 ppm would be 0.01666% of that. A small flake in a liter. I would say that my gold fish are capable of eating this 6 grams and releasing at least 4 grams of waste each day.

Something feels fishy...

I don't think these are really part of the takeaway message you should be getting. There really isn't an 80 ppm set in stone level that AP people use. Nitrates do cause problems for fish, they aren't as toxic as ammonia and nitrites but they do cause problems. Some fish aren't as sensitive as others and sometimes the changes are subtle. Sometimes the toxicity depends on the life stage of the fish being studied.

https://www.was.org/meetings/Mobile/MG_Paper.aspx?i=33523
http://images.library.wisc.edu/EcoNatRes/EFacs/Groundwater/CrunkiltonAcute/reference/econatres.crunkiltonacute.i0008.pdf

Table 3 in this study is interesting
http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/tmdl/records/region_2/2008/ref2426.pdf