Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I'll have to look in to that Brian. My phone does some fancy stuff, but I rarely ever talk to it (or on it).

Luckily I did make my wicking bed just like my other beds, so I have a central drain then just tossed a 5 gal bucket under it because I don't have the drain connected in to my sump. It only drained about 10 gallons of water before it got back down to my normal "acceptable" water height =)

The funny thing was while I was watching the bed drain I saw some interesting things going on with bugs in the bed... there was a roly poly/pill bug that made it's way to a high spot in the dirt above the water line. Then looking closely there was an ant the climbed on it's back to get even higher away from the water. Eventually the roly poly had enough and took off in to the water and then the ant was actually walking on top of the surface of the water. Covalent bonds at work there! Science! But on the flipside... I discovered I have an ant problem while looking closely at my celery plant. They were walking up and down the celery like an army. I haven't done any reading on how to get rid of them yet... my first thought was to sprinkle diatomaceous earth all over the plant and hope they cut themselves on it and die... so I tried that and we'll see if it helps.

If I have a bug problem in my wicking bed I just flood to the top leave 1/2 hr scoop all the bugs off and then drain to set level
Beauty of separate wicking beds if you have a problem you can treat without hurting the fish

I did that without intending to F&F =)

Last night I saw a couple of deer in the back field so I decided since I still have 4 or 5 months before I can hunt them I would shoot them with the camera instead. We bought a nice dSLR for Christmas but other than a few kid pictures I haven't played around with it yet.





Just to make this actually fit in with BYAP... storm clouds rolling in at sunset over the greenhouse... =)

I finally got caught up. I love these big system threads. So inspiring. You've built a beauty of a GH. Can't wait to see how your tilapia do over the summer. I'm hoping to buy some land in eastern Washington this fall, and want to build something like this. Although that geodesic dome design calls to me as well... Anyway, keep up the awesome work!

Thanks Dom, I still have a lot of work to complete in the greenhouse before winter comes around again. A new requirement that has been established is that I need to come up with a way to add storage inside the greenhouse. We have all of our seedling trays and other garden supplies that I need to store someplace so they aren't all over in the garage/barn etc. I think I am going to build some rafter type shelves over the fish tank so I can store light items up there without interfering with anything else. I still need to finish siding it, sealing the foundation and building the solar heaters before next winter too, but I will hopefully get a little bit of time and money to work on those projects now that we're getting close to being done planting our garden, and I put all the weed mat down in the garden this year so hopefully we don't need to do much/any weeding will take a big task off our list. I just bought another roll to finish covering the little bit that I haven't covered in the garden yet.

I am still planning to add some NFT tubes and strawberry towers inside the greenhouse too, just haven't made it to the top of the list yet.

Rob, it looks really good! I'm envious of your access to hunt deer on your own land! A few motnhs ago we were looking at a house just on the edge of our village which has a good bit of land to it and has both some planted areas and some open pasture. Perfect for shooting a couple of deer each season.

Anyway, I will have to join a consortium somewhere or keep bying from my actively hunting friends. :-)
Perhaps I can trade them for some fish and vegetables in the future.....

Cheers - Jens

Jens I'm glad I have a little area for hunting. My hunting shack is at the back of my property, just left of the visible area in that picture of the greenhouse. I do gun hunt out here with my shotgun but I am pretty limited where I can shoot, it's more setup for bow hunting which I'm not a huge bow hunter, but as it is my grandpa on my mom's side has a 160 acre farm about 4 or 5 miles down the road, so I mostly hunt there while I can, eventually once he passes I think the farm will get sold, then I might take up bow hunting out back a little more but I only have 3.77 acres, compared to my grandpa's 160 acres it's not very good for hunting. I have planted a lot of trees to try and make it better though so deer aren't so nervous. Just being around while I do chores they are getting used to seeing me so might make it easier to sneak out to hunt.

I think I need to take a large aquarium fish net with me next time I go diving.... short unedited video from last night's dive of thousands of largemouth bass fry

Holy cow, yeah you should. That lake is amazingly clear

Hah... I was only about 7 feet deep in that area Brian... and the sun was shining, so it was great vis. Otherwise as I went deeper the vis dropped to about 5 feet until I was over 20ft deep then it opened back up to probably 20ft vis.

Maybe I'll upload some of the other videos I've taken in recent weeks. The main problem is that last week when I was diving my new gopro light I bought this past winter flooded somehow, so now I've switched back to my other light (I was actually using both in combination up until last week) so now I don't have as good of light, so once you start going deeper to where the vis is good right now you lose light and everything looks green on videos.

Hydroponics/Aquaponics/NFT/Vertical growing have found their way in to the future! A show on Netflix that I've enjoyed "The 100" is a post apocalyptic show set 100 years after a nuclear war. It starts out as the race of humans living in a space station orbiting Earth, they send 100 of their "criminal kids" to Earth to see if it is live-able yet because they find out after 97 years in space their spaceship is dying and they won't be able to provide clean breathable air much longer. I won't ruin any more of it for anyone who hasn't seen it, but I was watching season 4 episode 2 last night and something caught my eye... they had PVC NFT grow tubes growing their food in their camp on Earth. Then a few seconds later I noticed they had vertical grow towers exactly like I've seen elsewhere in my AP learning search.

We're pioneering the future!

Here is something for you iPhone 5/6/7 users and Samsung Galaxy 3 and 4... I was just opening up a 3D model for work and there are little splash images that show up of things other SolidWorks users have designed in SolidWorks, I've seen this camera housing a thousand times but never paid attention to it... this time I saw the name of the company that made it, so I googled them and found their website and found they have underwater housings for your cell phone... unfortunately they seem to be just focusing on iPhone, but I did see a couple of galaxy products... make sure you scroll to the bottom of the page... they have some of their housings for $5-$15 that they are trying to close out. Depending on what you are looking for they are rated for 33ft all the way up to nearly 200 ft (although they get more expensive in general, but there were some of the cheap ones still rated for 130ft etc.)... but even the 33ft you'll be plenty good to dunk your cell phone in your tanks to take better pictures/videos!

https://www.watershot.com/

I added NFT tubes to my system yesterday. I built a small A frame to put them up over top of my smaller fish tank because it was the only place I could think of that would be somewhat accessible without taking away from other things or having to be moved in the winter to keep from blocking the water barrels on the north wall.


The plan is to use NFT tubes for growing herbs and maybe strawberries too (I might do vertical towers for strawberries... haven't made up my mind yet). The nice thing about the NFT is that I reworked my pump return line to be able to use the pump I was already using and just split it and feed one side to the fish tank and the other side to the NFT (and eventually I'll split it again and feed the other fish tank too, but I still have not hooked the drain together for the second fish tank, so for now I took the supply line out too. I had to raise the supply for the fish tank up to the same height as the supply for the NFT or all the water took the path of least resistance and just went to the fish tank instead of the NFT. I didn't buy any additional 1" PVC for this project, so I had to make due with what I already had, which means there are a couple if bends and extra 90's that I wouldn't have used otherwise... but it works so that is all that matters. I also discovered that I had air getting trapped in the lines once the supply was higher than the items I was trying to push water to, so I added a vertical vent pipe to vent air out. I might need to add a second one on the right side going to the fish tank because the one on the left line is past the shutoff valve so might still effect the flow.

The NFT tubes are a bit smaller than most I've seen... I had a 10ft and an 8ft chunk of 3" thin wall PVC, so that is what I used. I cut them down to 3 lengths of 5ft and one length of 3ft (plus the elbows). I had to go buy 4 pieces of 90 degree elbow and I think I cut up (3) 8ft 2x4's, otherwise I had everything else on hand.

I used a hole saw which gave me a hole just big enough for a small pool noodle to fit tightly inside, then I put rockwool in the bottom of the pool noodle chunks to start seeds in and wick water up to the seeds. I think I have about 50 holes with 4" centers, if I plant bushier plants I'll just skip a hole in between plants.

I have harvested my first few cherry tomatoes out of the garden! Friday I pulled one cherry tomato that was ripe and since there was only one I did the nice thing... I picked a handful of black cap raspberries and went inside and had my wife choose a hand... of course she chose the hand with my cherry tomato in it ugh! So she got to eat the first ripe tomato. We went away for the long weekend (left Friday, came home Tuesday) and I picked 4 more cherry tomatoes out of the garden, so we both got to eat two of them last night. 4 days was too long to be away from the greenhouse with our herbs still in seed starter pots. They dried out and fried in the greenhouse. Looks like a total loss. Luckily I have other herbs started in the NFT and more in dirt pots but it will take them a couple weeks to catch up, where these ones we lost were at prime age for starting to use them... lessons learned. I'll see how well the herbs do in the NFT and either plant all of the herbs in NFT before going away from now on or if they don't produce well in the NFT I'll just start planting them in the wicking bed instead... we have a lot of stuff in the wicking bed that isn't needed right now since it is all growing in the garden right now so I could convert the wicking bed over for herbs for the time being too if they grow better in the dirt.