Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I'll try to remember tonight Jens. There isn't really much more to see inside just yet... it's still kind of a mess because I am still using it for construction storage while I finish working on the greenhouse.

Very good looking growth there Rob. I'm currently having zero luck growing lettuce. Got any pointers for me?

Thanks Rob,

I'm just always curious to see how others put things together.
Good inspiration come from the tiniest details sometimes.


Cheers - Jens

Brian, all I can really say about lettuce is that it seems like it grows really well in gravel at least for starting it. Pretty much everything in the DWC was started in my small "test" system in just pea stone gravel then I transferred it all to DWC when I got everything else operational. I just sprinkle the lettuce seeds across the gravel then lightly brush the gravel to kind of cover the seeds with just a few pebbles. Once they have started to grow and have a few leaves and the root is starting to grow decent then transfer them to DWC. I know there was a post a year or so ago that was discussing seed starter trays using just stone for sprouting seeds which used a peanut butter jar full of water upside down with a hole drilled in it to slowly water the seedlings and keep water level at a constant level. I attempted that before the AP system was running, but I was just using tap water because I didn't have the fish effluent water at that point, so it didn't work very well but from what I read most people use water from their system then they get the nutrients that was lacking in mine.

There are a few lettuce plants in my DWC that were not started in the test version, within the last couple weeks I pulled some stuff that got really woody and wasn't sure what it was, so I replanted from some lettuce seedlings that I took out of the gravel bed. I think things start much better in the gravel than in hydroton so far from what I've seen. Maybe my gravel bed will just be a starter bed then move stuff to the other beds once it is established.

You will see in the video below that I made per Jens' request that the lettuce in the gravel bed is really thick how it starts, but then pulling them out and putting them in DWC allows them to get bigger. I harvested quite a bit of lettuce in the fall and over winter out of the test system, it was all smaller like what is in the gravel bed which it is not very crunchy. I noticed that the big stuff in the DWC seems tougher now so it should hopefully have a little crunch to it. We will probably start taking one of the big heads every week now so we won't have to buy any for a while.

Here is a video update so Jens can see the rest of the greenhouse. It's still a mess, still need to paint everything on the inside and still have a lot of construction stuff sitting around. Still need to haul in a bunch of gravel for the floor.

Should have noted, when you see the wicking bed in the video notice the lettuce. It is the same kind and same age as what was started in the gravel bed in the video (well the gravel bed I have a mesclun mix then I have black seeded simpson). It is growing much much faster in the gravel AP system than in the wicking bed. I won't grow lettuce in dirt again after this experiment... just trying to figure out what grows best where...

My hydroton bed has a big broccoli plant in it that is finally growing a head. The hydroton doesn't do a very good job of holding that big plant up. I have to keep shoving it down in the hydroton farther to support it. There are three little roma tomato plants that have sprouted in that bed as well as some peas. I will not start seeds in hydroton again... they don't start very well, need a more dense area for roots to start.

Thanks for the tour Rob!
I like the fact that you test out so many different setups side by side.
The greenhouse is actually larger than I thought.

Love the DWC carrots, that's awesome!

I use 2" net pots with coco coir/vermiculite mix to start seeds.
Once they get going and roots start peeking out of the net pots I move them to the DWC pot and all.

This season I have started a lot of seeds indoors, but I feel too many of them have fizzeled out. I guess it's for lack of light.
I will have to make a seed starting rack with lights for next season.

I'm looking forward to seeing your progress on the greenhouse!


Cheers - Jens

Looks like you've gotten a lot done Rob, that's a big job. The seed starting in your AP grow beds will be better in the summer but starting them as plugs is the way I do most of my plants even when it's warm.

Wow! I don't know where to begin. Your setup looks fantastic!!! That was a wonderful tour. It stirred up those feelings of envy from me and I am certain a whole bunch of other folks as well. Man you are great at getting projects moving with fantastic results!
On the lettuce: I'm wondering if I just don't have enough sunlight on my lettuce? My DWC while being in a aesthetically pleasing location is below one of two insulated wooden rafter areas. I've been considering adding a couple of sets of T5 florescent lights.I was hoping I'd be able to wait for Fall to add them. If I do install grow lights I will do it on the lower grow beds as well as over the DWC. The lower beds were working okay because I had the tomatoes in the underneath beds and they quickly grow up and out of there towards the sun. However when I rebuilt my beds I moved them up to the top for convenience. I guess it is time to get more clones started and plant them below again. Tomatoes are still growing gangbusters. We had ten in a tomato sauce for dinner last evening.
I NEED lettuce so I will follow your advice. This last batch of mixed lettuces I started in peat. They went well for a few weeks, then wilted and died. I may have a slugs issue or some other creature that is eating the soft succulent seedlings.
Some of the other seedlings look like something weakened the base of the stems and they fall over.
I know there was more questions I wanted to add,but now after watching the video again this morning I focused on the gravel beds and the pea gravel starter beds.
Thank you Rob.
Now go to the fish room and do the same I want to know more about breeding trout

Jens, we've had really poor luck with starting seeds indoors. We try it every year and it just seems like they get too tall without any bulk to them so they don't have any strength when we move them outdoors. Part of it I'm sure is the light indoors, we set them in windows but our house only has windows on the east, north, and west, our garage is on the south side of our house so no south windows to start seeds in, that means we can only give them a little sun in the morning or in the evening. I bought a small LED to try starting seeds a couple of years ago but it wasn't powerful enough to make a difference (it's actually hanging in the greenhouse over the second fish tank that isn't connected because I was using it on my test system over winter to try and give the plants a little extra light, but I think if I have to run supplemental lighting in the winter I might invest in metal halide lights because they would be powerful enough to grow the plants plus give me extra heat to warm the greenhouse... I will probably wait another year before I decide if I'm going to add supplemental lighting for winter or not. I need to get my solar panels built and installed before I add that though so they offset the electric required to run them so my electric bill doesn't get any higher.

This year having the greenhouse we're starting all of the seeds in the shelf above the growbeds so the seeds didn't sprout quite as fast as they would have indoors because the temperature is still a little lower than inside the house (and I'm still waiting on most of my tomato and peppers to sprout because I think they want constant 70F or more before they really get started), but it will hopefully reduce the shock for the plants we move outdoors... the stuff that started in AP will probably stay in AP through the summer just to see how they do and see how hot it gets in the greenhouse. I think it might stay 75F in there max until the outdoor temp gets above 75F because Sunday it was about 72F and the indoor temp stayed 75F, so it might not get too scorching hot in the greenhouse having the water barrels to help cool the temp for summer. Our average high at the hottest part of summer is only 82F, while the average low that time of year is only 60F, so it might be quite pleasant inside the greenhouse in the summer if it manages to stay a little cooler than outside the greenhouse.



The greenhouse outside dimensions are about 16ft x 16ft (4.88 meters x 4.88 meters), so it's an OK size, not the best layout, but better than nothing. I think if we are fairly successful with this greenhouse I will either expand it or build a larger hoop house in the future... even if the expansion or hoop house were only used for spring/summer/fall season extension and the smaller greenhouse is used for winter growing would be OK.


scotty, I think the lettuce I'll continue starting right in the gravel bed because they seem to start really well in the bed. Everything else I may end up starting in seed trays then transplant them that way I can sprout them indoors or higher in the greenhouse where it's a little warmer (but I'm sure the reason everything else didn't sprout quite as fast is that the water temp is still only about 55F when I test the fish tank water every couple of days), then move them in to the AP system when they are ready to be transplanted. I still have a lot of work to do with the greenhouse, I'm just getting burned out. I wake up at 5am every day to go to work by about 5:30, then work until 4pm, go pick my son up and spend 2 hours with him before my wife gets home around 6pm, then by the time we eat dinner it's 7-7:30pm, then try getting the kid to bed by 8pm, then I do my chores between 8-9pm and I try to get to bed around 9pm so I can get up and do it again by 5am the next day... really my only time to work on projects is the weekend and now that weather is getting nicer we're going to get to the busy season of family get togethers, mowing the yard, my scuba diving season, all of the good stuff... so my projects will probably be pretty slow over the summer (although I'll probably start cutting back on my hours for the summer so I won't go to bed quite as early might give me a little more time to do things at night).

Brian, I'm great at starting projects... not so great at finishing projects =) my wife can't stand that I have so many projects active at one time, she would rather I just finish one project before moving on to the next project, but I get bored working on the same thing all the time, plus some projects are better for nice weather while other projects inside the house are OK for rainy weather etc... eventually I'll finish all of the projects... maybe =)

If your lettuce is starting decent but then dying off when you move it to the DWC I would probably look at getting it more light too. You could test it even with a cheap clamp light and spiral CFL bulb (or if you still have old incandescent lights). There was a rather interesting post on plantedtank forum that I've bookmarked talking about PAR, and surprisingly if you use a clamp light so it has a decent reflector on it spiral CFL bulbs are capable of producing quite a bit of PAR for plants in water... so I would think you could set up a test fixture over part of your DWC to see if giving them more light would help them or if not that might tell you something else is going on and keep you from buying fluorescent fixtures that might not be your problem. Seems like you are far enough south that you would get a lot more sun than we do, you haven't put your shade cloth back on for the summer yet have you? I had fungus gnats in my system pretty heavily when I first planted all of my seedlings but they didn't seem to really hurt anything even though they say they will eat the seedlings and kill them... I put out some sticky traps that seem to be working well for the gnats, so hopefully their larvae dies off too once there aren't as many gnats to produce more larvae.

Hey Rob,

I feel you on the whole projects issue. Sounds a lot like me and my dear wife! :-)
We work similarly long hours and my wife is just flabbergasted whenever I start a new project.

I actually have lots of windows facing south, but there's just not enough light this far north in the winter.
Everything I read says the same thing. You need to use grow lights to start seedlings.
All the greenhouse farmers here do it, and they wouldn't if it did not make sense.

I agree with you on starting seedlings in the GH, though.
They will be stronger, although they will come later.
I'm playing with the idea of converting half of my little old GH into my microgreens and seed starter area.

Cheers - Jens

Had to use Copenhagen, your city was not in the drop down menu's

Optimum Tilt of Solar Panels by Month

Figures shown in degrees from vertical

Jan 18°
Feb 26°
Mar 34°
Apr 42°
May 50°
Jun 58°

Jul 50°
Aug 42°
Sep 34°
Oct 26°
Nov 18°
Dec 10°

Winter 10° angle
Spring/Autumn 34° angle
Summer 58° angle

Notes:
On the 21st December, the sun will rise 52° east of due south and set 52° west of due south.

On the 21st March/21st September, the sun will rise 91° east of due south and set 91° west of due south.

On the 21st June, the sun will rise 132° east of due south and set 132° west of due south.

I believe it is safe to say that my greenhouse is probably going to stay 75F maximum until the air temperature is above 75F. It did hit 80F one day this past week when it was 80F outdoor air temp, but every other time I've checked it is 75F inside the greenhouse if the air temp is below 75F outside the greenhouse, which seems like a nice temp so things don't get fried (I guess the only thing that might change that is once the air temp is constantly in the 70's then the water temp will hit the 70's, maybe then it might be warmer in the greenhouse because the water won't be buffering the air temp down as well).

I believe I am going to harvest a couple of trout this week for our first trout meal. I will probably wait until Wednesday because my wife's cousin who stays with us early in the week claims she is allergic to fish (I think she's full of crap, because she's a bit of a hypochondriac and makes a lot of claims that make absolute zero sense in my common sense thinking brain, but if she doesn't want to eat trout with us the more for us...)

I think I'll probably harvest 2 just to see how far they go for us, then maybe get in the habit of taking 1 a week (if I think 1 will be enough for a meal for the two of us) until they are gone or until my water temp creeps above 65F and stays there.

I sent a note to a friend who is a bigger fisherman than I am and asked his thoughts on how to cook the trout seems how I've never caught/cleaned/cooked trout before... he had just caught what looked like a huge rainbow trout a couple weekends ago that he had posted a picture of it on facebook. I made a comment about how I didn't want to eat my trout yet because I wanted them to get huge like the picture he had posted and he told me what he caught was a "steelhead" not a "rainbow trout" and that "rainbow trout" are best tasting in the 12-16" range, if they get over 16" they do not taste as good. He said the "steelhead" they were catching were in the 30-36" range but that my rainbow trout would not get as large as steelhead. So here is a question for whomever wants to speculate... rainbow trout and steelhead are the same exact species, the difference is that rainbow trout spend their entire lives in fresh water. Steelhead after being born in fresh water grow up in salt water then return to fresh water to spawn. What do you suppose would cause rainbow trout to not grow as large as steelhead, and not taste as good as steelhead if they were to grow larger? Diet? I've been told before that fresh water fish are higher fat content than salt water fish... in my salty aquarium days I was debating about using fresh water livebearers (guppies, mollies) as a food source for salt water fish, but apparently people claim that causes fatty livers in salt water fish that would shorten their life expectancy... what would cause the same species of fish to not grow to the same size and not taste the same just because they grew up in fresh water vs. salt water?

Hey Rob,

I don't know a lot of scientific facts about this, but growing up in a seafaring family I've always been fed fish.

I know from experience that some fresh water species have a somewhat off taste (in my opinion), for example I don't care much for bass unless it's really young.

Rainbow trout and the other fresh water varieties of the Salmo family can get pretty big, and they still taste really good.

Mostly, however they are harvested for consumption at the 600 - 1000 grams size, depending on whether they are going to be smoked or prepared as a fresh meal i.e steamed, grilled or whatever.

Here in Denmark we have many put-and-take lakes for sports fishing. This is catch and release operations, and the fishes get really big. The largest Rainbow trout caught in a Danish Put and Take was 12,55 KG. This is a trout measuring over 1 meter or 39".


Cheers - Jens

We ate two rainbow trout last night. They were a little smaller than I expected, still only 10-11 inches and about half a pound each. I know there are larger ones in there and it looked like maybe one smaller yet, so I am debating about if I'm ready to put them in the freezer or not.

We baked them with just a little olive oil on the outside and lemon juice on the inside with dill, salt and pepper sprinkled all over them. Baked at 400f for ten minutes then put a little water in the pan and baked another ten minutes, I don't think I'll add water again because the side that was in water was harder to peel the skin off and harder to pull off the bones. Ended up picking a lot more bones out of my mouth on that side than the side that was dry, but the recipe we followed said to do it so we did. Next time we won't.

I picked a couple pea pods for my wife to snack on last night, they were the first greenhouse peas. We are up to our ears with lettuce, kale and Swiss chard so I don't think we will need to buy any greens for the rest of this year. Tomatoes and peppers are sprouting so hopefully they start growing like crazy soon.

That's just the way they should be cooked! Without the water that is......

I usually wrap them in tin foil to keep in the fragrances and moisture.