Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

We will try it again this week, my wife asked me earlier today what day I wanted to eat fish. Now that we started she's ready for eating fish every week. I guess that's ok as it's really starting to warm up now, was pushing 80 in the greenhouse again this morning so I opened the windows and it's dropped back down to lower 70s, still dropping below 60 in the greenhouse at night so trout are ok for now but not sure how much longer.

a little more progress on the siding... I finished the east wall except for the small corner near the south wall, I decided since it was not connected to any of the siding on the east wall that I would wait until I side the south wall so I can make that little piece on the east and west walls match the siding height of the south wall so it will look nicer. I also took down what I had already done on the east wall and fixed it so it lines up better, there was about a 1-1.5 inch gap at the bottom of the corner due to the foundation bricks not being level, I made the siding level rather than cutting it to match the block angle figuring no one was really going to notice, but the first time my wife looked at it she noticed it and asked what I was going to do there, so I took the siding back down and put a piece of J channel down there instead of starter strip and cut the bottom piece of siding to match the blocks so it filled in that gap, plus made the siding on the north wall match the east wall a lot closer.


I started on the west wall and went as far as I could until I ran out of screws... went and bought more but we spent a couple hours at stores getting stuff for a few different projects, so by the time I got back to the siding the sun was on that side of the greenhouse and I was getting fried, along with the reflection of sun off white siding into my eyes I decided to call it quits and mow the yard instead then called it a night so my wife could get some work done too I went in to watch the kid.

That does look great. How long does it take you to put up a wall with that many windows to go around? I love the way it looks though an am tempted to do it on our house instead of stucco, but don't know with all my sloppy construction on the exterior over the years, it may be difficult to do.

Brian, vinyl siding is really easy to do. It has taken me longer than I like to get the siding up but that is because I did not have the wood trimmed out around the windows and door before I started, so it took me a little bit of thinking to decide how I wanted to trim it out (I still have more to do on the windows for my final plan, I just put up what I needed to be able to put the J's around them) and then actually cutting the boards and putting them up. The west wall has gone up a lot faster than the east wall because I already had a plan and didn't have to deal with the door and have one less window, but I still need to finish trimming out the windows.

If you have all of your trim / brick moulding in place then it's simple, put up the corners, put up J channel against any trim and moulding then start tossing it up. It goes extremely quickly if you have two people, one person cutting the trim the other person installing it and taking measurements for the next piece, but doing it by myself isn't too tough, just more up and down on ladders. The worst part is that I couldn't find my good tin snips, the pair I found was kind of rusted, so I sprayed them with WD40 to try and loosen them up but the rust is still stronger than the spring, so my hand does get a little tired having to open the snips instead of having the tool do it on its own, but that's my fault for not taking care of my tools I guess.

A couple pictures of the lettuce plant I picked last night... they are getting massive! This is out of the DWC.

You have a nice looking building there.

thanks cracken, I'm hopeful that it will look nice when I'm done... we're still trying to bump up the value of our house/property before we refinance it, need to get a good appraisal so need things to look nice before I go get a new appraisal for it.

Last night I cleaned 4 more trout and put them in the freezer. My water temp was up to 66F, so I'm getting scared about getting closer to 70F where it seems like they start dying, so I will clean a few each night this week and get them in the freezer then start moving my tilapia out to the greenhouse for the summer. For the time being I've been opening the windows so the greenhouse doesn't warm up as much to try and keep the water temp cooler but tomorrow it is supposed to be 80F, so I think I will leave the windows open overnight tonight because the air temp is supposed to be mid 50's tonight which should help cool the water a bit before the increase tomorrow, and mid 50's should hopefully not shock the plants. It's a bit of a stressful game, so I'll be happy when I get them all in the freezer and then hope for it to start warming up more for the tilapia to grow faster.

my biggest trout so far...




And for fun I took one of the trout in for the kid to see... raise 'em right, 8 months old teach them to like touching fish!

I've processed a few more trout the past few nights. So far I've had 3 or 4 that were 17-19oz (480 - 540 grams roughly), one that was only about 8 oz (227g) which I had noticed when I moved them from the small tank to the larger tank that it had a damaged fin so was much smaller than the rest... I guess I should have just ate it then because it is still so much smaller than the rest, it must have had a hard time competing for food with the damaged fin. The rest of them have been roughly 14oz (396g). Including the two we ate last week I've processed 13 of them so far, so I believe I have 11 left to process. I am gutting them then double wrapping them in plastic wrap before sealing them with our vacuum sealer on gentle setting then putting them in the deep freeze until we need them.

I'm heading out of town for a couple of days so hopefully it doesn't get too warm while I'm gone. This Saturday is 'fish days' at my local co-op, I am thinking I will probably go and pick up another 25 perch and try them again now that my system is a little more mature and I'm taking the trout out hopefully replacing them with the little perch won't cause a cycle to kick off this time... I am thinking I will keep the perch in one tank and get the other tank plumbed in to the system then I'll move my tilapia in to the second tank. I think the perch probably take 2 years to grow out from what I've seen so far. Maybe I can speed that up by keeping them in their own tank, their growth rate was probably slowed by having to compete with the trout.

I decided to cover one of our raised beds this past weekend because our tomato seedlings are getting too big in the greenhouse, I need to get them in the dirt. I tried copying what I think Scotty's setup was that I had seen... PVC electrical conduit with plastic cover and rope to keep it tight. My grow beds are not quite as nice as Scotty's, so I ended up taking a piece of PVC about 18" long and pounded it down in to the ground a bit then screwed it in to my beds. I figured having it in the ground a bit would help support the bed because the middle of the beds were already bowing out a bit, but then screwing it to the bed will keep the conduit from pushing the PVC out away from the bed too.





We bought a huge role of plastic with the intent of being able to cover all of our beds and future beds too, but I need dirt to finish filling the other beds so I haven't bought the rest of the electrical conduit of the other beds yet.

I think I'm going to call tomorrow and have 10 yards of top soil delivered hopefully before the weekend so I can finish filling my other raised beds this weekend and fill some low spots in my yard so water quits standing in my yard.

I picked up a yard of crushed concrete that was enough to pretty well level off the greenhouse floor and get rid of the muddy mess. I'm pretty amazed how much better it looks just by doing that, even though it still looks dirty from the crushed concrete being dirty. I think over time it will look even better as the dirty brown gets washed away on the crushed concrete, but just being level makes a huge difference. I didn't think to take pictures but it looks a lot better!

Then I cleaned out most of the construction stuff that has been laying around, so I only have a few tools left in there for putting up the siding and they are all in one area so it looks nicer due to the garbage being removed too... I took two of my small 30 gallon barrels that I haven't used for anything yet and set them up against my water barrels then moved an interior door that I had taken down inside the house out there to make a nice sized work bench, plus I added another shelf to put seedlings on over top of the wicking bed, and I moved my seedling shelf that I had hung over the DWC down a couple of feet because it was so high that I had to stand on the beds to be able to look at the seedling and see if they needed water, so my wife wouldn't do anything with them... so now I moved them down low enough that I can pretty much see in them standing on the ground, she will still need a stool to stand on. I might just build some small wooden benches that can be stood on or sat on to have something permanent in there.

The wife came out and helped move a bunch of seedlings that had 4 per pot so we only have 1 per pot in most of the pots now, but we have some tomato plants that are getting huge that we haven't split out yet, we are hoping the weather is going to warm up and we will move them out in to the covered raised bed later this week (the last couple of nights have been down near freezing for a low so wanted to wait until it gets back in to the 40's as a night time low).

We also ordered 10 yards of topsoil and spent a lot of time Saturday filling in low spots in the yard that have had standing water. Yesterday I hauled enough dirt to the garden that I built two potato towers and planted them, then I was sore enough that I gave up on hauling dirt but I will probably do a little bit every night until we get it all moved because right now it is taking up our guest parking / turnaround spot in our driveway. I need to haul quite a bit of the dirt out to the garden to finish filling the two raised beds that I built earlier this year, and I am thinking I might fill the top of the IBC tote that was cut off as a little bit of a wicking bed in the garden, it has a couple holes for drains in it and I'll just leave them open so there will be just a little water that stays in the IBC and the rest can drain. I think I might build one more raised bed, then the only things we will plant in the ground this year will be pumpkins/gourds/watermelon/cucumbers/zucchini that all seemed to do OK in the ground last year, everything else will be planted in raised beds so we have better soil for growing in using the top soil and compost instead of the clay ground.

Here are the two pictures I did take yesterday... what is left of the topsoil that I need to move (most of it)



and last night's dinner... the big guy was 19.75 ounces, just a little bigger than my previous biggest one I think.

That looks absolutely fantastic.
Good luck on the refinance.

We aren't even close to trying to refinance yet.... I need to finish a few more projects first to bring the value up more.

Wowsa again Rob! Great progress.
Between my wife's poor health and me intermittently being plagued by pain, I haven't been online very much at all. I just now read the wonderful description of installing siding, thank you.

Brian, I hope you get some relief soon. I'm sure you are going stir crazy wanting to get things done and not being able to. I still haven't finished my siding, just not enough hours in the day. I am hopeful to go home early today and get a couple of extra hours working on one of my many projects because the kid woke me up at 2:45am and I couldn't get back to sleep, so now 4am I'm at work and getting a 3-4 hour head start on the day so will take off at least a couple hours earlier than usual so I can try to get something done this afternoon before I have to pick the kid up.

I walked around and got some update pictures of some of the projects last night. My potato towers don't really look that great because I reused chicken wire that was already kind of a mess... I think next time I'll use welded wire fence instead, it has more structure on it's own and should be able to pull it tighter so it looks a little better than my lopsided towers, but hopefully in time we'll still see a big crop of potatoes out of these not so pretty towers.






raised beds, still need to finish filling 2 of them with the dirt we bought last weekend


greenhouse floor... doesn't look the greatest because most of the crushed concrete is dirty brown, but I think it will get splashed here and there over time and end up washing up and all being more of the white concrete color. I think it looks a lot better than it did just having a flat floor and no mud.


inside shots... table with lots of seed pots ready for planting, barrels, fish tanks. you can see the tomato plants above the fish tank on the left are getting huge, need to be moved outdoors ASAP!

this was near dark last night, outside temp 54 according to my phone, about 68 inside... still not great, need to seal the foundation still... my barrels were sweating pretty badly though so I think they were actually cooling the greenhouse because they are in the shade already.