Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Got it, I tried posting the entire link in the youtube tabs. Thanks Mark!

It is fun when the fish go from "are you going to murder us?" to "hey it is the guy with food, applause!"
I hear ya on the dremal tool bits and tips. Once in a while I remember while in the dreaded Walsmart and buy a couple tips with carbide teeth. On the other side I love my step bit for drilling holes in boxes.

Not a lot happening in the greenhouse lately, been busy with some other house projects and hunting season. I did manage to finish insulating half of the ceiling and put plywood up and got the first coat of paint on the plywood while my dad was up visiting this past week, but I need to get another coat of paint on it and finish insulating the other half of the ceiling then get plywood up on it and paint it as well... and still have not finished the east and west walls, they are insulated but need to get plastic over the insulation then plywood up, but kind of holding off on that until I finish my controller and get it installed so I can run the wires before I put the plywood up. I will hopefully have some time this weekend to work on finishing the controller so I can install it.

Our temperatures were holding strong in the 40's, 50's, even saw a few days last week in the 60's and one day hit 70 and then the day after being 70 we had our first snow and it's been in the 20s and 30s since then. I'm not tracking the temperature in the greenhouse yet until I get the controller installed but there is a noticeable difference in temperatures when I go out there. It is still warm enough to feel comfortable in the greenhouse without a coat on while outdoors you get cold pretty quick. I'm not sure that the water barrels are really doing anything yet. I don't know if it's because we haven't had much sun or if it's because the sun is not far enough south yet to really hit the barrels good... it seems like the sun is still at the point that gets some shade between the south glass wall and the upper glass wall, so maybe a little later in the season it will do better. I did check my water temp the other day and it was down to about 46 degrees in the trout tank. The trout seem happy as can be, but I don't know how well the plants like it. They are still growing, and I have my first tomato growing on the vine with several more buds flowering, but it does seem a bit slow probably due to water temps being lower.

I think I might have lost a second tilapia in my indoor aquarium but it is hard to tell for sure as they are very active looking for food now every time I am near so it is hard to count without taking them out of the tank. The tilapia appear to have doubled in size already, they are some place in the 2-3" range now, and you can definitely start seeing some differences in their growth speeds, but I'm hoping that means the small ones are females like Sam mentioned so I know I will at least have a few females to try and form a breeding colony from. There is one that is quite a bit larger than the rest so I'm assuming it is a male and he seems to be pretty dominant chasing other fish off if they come in his area of the tank. I might need to upgrade them to a larger tank soon to keep them from getting too territorial. I need to clean out the 40B sump tank that still has saltwater in it from my big reef tank then I could move the tilapia in to it, or I have a brand new 55 gallon aquarium out in the greenhouse I could move indoors to move the tilapia into.

Congrats on your first winter tomato. It is always amazing to see that happing in the winter.

I haven't really seen much growth on my tomatoes the past week or so since I noticed the first tomato... there are a lot of buds on the plant but not starting to grow tomatoes and the one little tomato that is on there is staying pretty small... the lettuce still seems to be growing slowly, and swiss chard is definately growing at least at a slow pace, and pea plants are growing slowly. So I decided to try adding some supplemental lighting to see if it helps them out a bit..

It might be the water temp too, might be getting too cold for the plants to grow... it was 52F when I checked it last night, but it had been close to 60F outside yesterday so it was probably colder water temp overnight... my water barrels really don't seem to be helping at all. For now I'll see if supplemental lighting helps or not... not a lot I can do about the temps right now... still have some construction to finish in the greenhouse before I can focus on temperature...

I have a few different LED fixtures laying around not in use right now, so I went out and ran a trellis wire across from east to west wall which I needed to do anyway to start trellising the tomato plants since they reached the top of the bamboo stakes, but I used the wire to hang a small LED grow light from it. I had bought this grow light a year or two ago to use for sprouting seeds indoors and wasn't overly impressed with it because the plants grew towards the light too fast and never got any bulk to support their own weight, but for now we'll see how it does as a supplemental light. I put it on a timer to turn on about 5am and turn off about 10am thinking by then the sun will be coming in decent, then turn back on around 4pm and stay on until about 10pm just to extend the light a bit longer for the plants. Eventually once I finish the controller I will be able to build photocells in to the system so it can sense how much light is in the greenhouse and turn the supplemental lights off once the sun is bright enough, which will make it better for cloudy days when we don't get any sun.





The coverage on this fixture is not great... it was just a very cheap fixture... but it already has the red/blue (pink) color spectrum without any work from me so I hung it up at least for a few days. One of my original LED fixtures I had bought for my aquariums had a blue/white spectrum. I had too much moisture get in to it because I had it under a table above a sump tank and the table was trapping moisture and killed the cooling fans in the fixture which caused the light to overheat. I need to order new fans for it and then I think I will change out most of the white LED's in the fixture with red LED's to adjust the color spectrum then I can use that fixture instead... it is a much more powerful fixture and will have a lot better light coverage area as well... I have four additional LED fixtures on top of that one that have a full spectrum color spectrum which maybe eventually I might switch over to the red/blue spectrum, but for now I only need one good fixture since I only have the one 4x4 bed.

checked a couple of trout yesterday to see how big they were getting... this guy is probably about 9" and it seemed to be on the smaller side. There are two or three with massive bellies compared to this one so I'm thinking some of them might be 10-11" easily.

Sounds like you have some soldering ahead It's pretty cool that those fixtures are serviceable. Trout look awesome already. Amazing how quick the grow, isn't it?

You might have to pollenate the plants if there aren't any pollenators able to get to them. Might not get any tomatoes if you don't.

At least with tomatoes all you really need to do is tap/shake the plants a bit!

Boss, I've replaced several LED's on the fixtures in the past when they burned out... but for some reason when I tried the other night I just could NOT get the solder to come off to be able to remove the old LED... of course I was trying to do it without breaking the LED since they are still good I can reuse them later if needed. I'm a novice when it comes to soldering and even greener when it comes to de-soldering. I have a solder sucker (plunger style) which doesn't seem like it actually does anything, and I also have a desoldering wick (the copper mesh stuff that I assume solder is supposed to be more attracted to)... was not having any luck so I gave up for the night, then I have not had a chance to get back to it since then. I did order new fans for that fixture and they were already delivered so I can swap them out (hopefully the fans are the right size...)

Scotty/Mel, I have been shaking the tomato plants and pepper plants and blowing directly on the blossoms. It appears to be working fine for the pepper plants, but the tomato plants so far only the one tomato growing on them. I am going to try taking a Q-tip to them to manually pollinate them... I assume all I have to do is rub it around the different blossoms right (my plant biology lessons were a long time ago in a class that I was more interested in the new gal that transferred in from another school that sat next to me than I was interested in plants at the time). I suppose I could just ask my wife how to manually pollinate tomatoes since she does it for a living (well at least one of the projects she worked on involved growing tomatoes in a greenhouse then sequencing the genomes as they were studying how to bring flavor back to greenhouse grown tomatoes). Unfortunately for having an 'expert' live in my house... she hasn't been overly involved in the greenhouse project so far. Hopefully once I get everything running so it is more of a greenhouse and less of a construction zone she will get more involved with it.

You might try another brand of solder wick. I've had some that doesn't work at all. It seems like the manufacture forgot to put flux on it. Good solder wick is the best. Good luck.

I 'tickle' my pepper flowers by sticking a fingertip into each flower and then onto the next, I can see the pollen sticking to my hand and it got results in my teeny test system so I must be doing something right. With the tomatoes, I sort of drum on the stem near each bunch of flowers, like drumming on the table with my fingers - I'm getting some forming so either that or the zillions of hoverflies are doing the job! I've heard of people 'buzzing' them with cheap electric toothbrushes too, which sounds ridiculous but fun.

Definitely ask your in-house expert though!

Tapping the top of the flower truss is all that is needed, don't use a Q-tips, that's why tomato's are self-pollinated.

I pollinate with a battery tooth brush sonic kind.
https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Sonicare ... TZWJZ&th=1

If I have five flowers I can get five tomatoes.

I shake the tomatoes like Mel but in high humidity it might help to use your fingertip, toothbrush...whatever since the pollen wants to clump. Lots of conditions can put the snafu on tomato pollenation so it could be something else like temperature.