Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I like it!

It was something I saw on another forum Maui... not only does it help you keep track of what you have for meal planning and knowing when you need to get (in my case raise/grow...) more food, but if something were to ever happen - power outage and food spoils, house fire and lose the freezer etc. you have a picture of the board which will help you claim your losses on your insurance (without having to go through a bunch of spoiled nasty smelly food to make a list if it all thaws out)

I've had poor luck starting seeds this fall. I finally decided to start seeds in the house then move them to the greenhouse when they get bigger.

Here is what I planted


This is day four


Day five


Day eight


Conclusion, I think it's important to have lights for the seeds to germinate... The temp has came down too, but these seedlings are sitting on top of my 240 aquarium in the house with my led lights only a few inches above them. The led fixtures are only like 180w a piece and they are on the lowest setting I can put them on now that I don't have any corals or plants in the aquarium. Next batch of seeds I think I'll try in the greenhouse with a spiral CFL bulb in a clamp light reflector above the seedlings and see if they sprout. Maybe I'll go try that on the seeds that I've been trying to sprout for a few weeks that I finally put a cheap led fixture over and see if they sprout (probably rotten by now but worth a try)

Since I'm uploading pics, here is a recent pic of my breeder tilapia.



Here are the bluegills


Both tanks are 4ft long for reference. The tilapia are in a 55 gal, the bluegills are in a 75 gal...

Are you finding breeding tilapia easy?


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Pretty easy. Provide the right temp, pH, and something for privacy and they do the rest. Right now my temp and pH are both wrong and they have no privacy so not breeding but I will adjust it over winter to get them busy again. I want to separate them in to two tanks with just one male each and split the females among them but I don't have free tank space right now.

Ok so as easy as what the internet says. What are you doing with the bluegills?


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The bluegills are just an experiment to see how fast they grow. I'm also testing channel catfish. Debating what I want to grow long term still. The rainbow trout were ok but not my favorite to eat. Tilapia we're good, but a lot of work cleaning for smaller filets... Plus they both create a deadline, trout out by 70f, tilapia out by 47f, so I am hoping the catfish grow at a decent rate and give good filets vs. the amount of effort for filleting them... Plus no deadline since they are native should be ok winter or summer. The bluegills aren't a long term thing, just want to see how much they grow in one year vs. two years etc. I might keep some breeders and see if they will breed in my 240 aquarium but they are hybrid so mostly male not sure if I'll have any females.

I will do tilapia one more year while I evaluate how fast the catfish grow. If catfish seem to be my solution then next fall I will probably remove the two IBC in my greenhouse and build a big plywood tank to raise many more catfish at a time in future years.

I have not had huge batches of tilapia fry hatch at once like the interwebs claim but it might be because I have 10 adults in a 55 gallon tank so they might be eating them before I get to them. I did raise a couple hundred fry total this year though. I'm not sure how many years they will reproduce, I am getting mixed answers some claim the females only breed the first year but that seems crazy because they are so small there is no way they could have hundreds per hatching at that size. The males I've seen get pretty big in other people's breed stock so I think I have a couple males worth keeping to let grow but the rest of the males will get eaten. I may still try to keep some females from the greenhouse if I can tell them apart because I think I only have about four females in my breeders and I want about three females per male and I plan on trying to keep the two largest males.

Ok so as easy as what the internet says. What are you doing with the bluegills?


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Very cool the way you've gone from ornamental fish to tilapia, catfish and bluegill in your aquariums and AP. Thank you for the updates.

Anyone ever tried 'deeraponics'? Ever seen a deer do a hand stand?

Kidding... had an interesting start to my day today. I got up and got ready for work, went to sit down to eat my peanut butter toast like every other morning but looked out the front window and saw a car stop at the end of my driveway. Then it looked like they turned their turn signal on to turn in to my driveway. It's 5AM and it is dark out... who in the heck is pulling in my driveway? They can't be up to any good...

OK settle down... the lady got out of her car... it's not her turn signal, it's her 4-ways. She walks to the back of the car... OK there is a body laying on the ground behind her car... so I grab a flashlight and go out to see if everything is OK. It's just a doe... was running from the field across the road crossing over to my yard and she smacked it. The lady was OK and all it did was break the turn signal cover, only hit the deer in the head. So I asked her if she had a phone or if she wanted me to call to get a police report for her auto insurance... she said she didn't think her insurance would fix it so didn't really want to wait for a police report. Asked if I wanted the deer because she and her husband didn't really care for venison... so I said sure I'll take her. The lady went on her way, I got my police license for her, dragged her out back and gutted her, hung her up in the barn and realized that it's supposed to get up to about 70F today... not good for leaving deer hanging... so I skinned her and quartered her and tossed her in a cooler with the ice I had in the freezer to cool her down. Going to run home at lunch with another big bag of ice to toss in there and keep her cool until tonight when I can finish cutting up the steaks and get it packaged / froze. Since she was hit in the head it didn't damage any of the meat! Only kind of roadkill I care for anymore (I've had body hit deer that I've cut up before and they are so damaged that I won't do that anymore...)

Luckily Sunday we decided to defrost the small deep freeze in preparation for hunting season, so had moved everything in to the big upright... so I finished cleaning up the deep freeze and plugged it back in so it will be cold by the time I get her packaged up tonight.

I got to work about 3 hours later than I planned on, but it only took me about an hour and 45 minutes to gut, hang, skin, and quarter her by myself (first one I've done completely by myself, every time I've processed my own deer before my dad has always been here to help speed things up... otherwise I've been taking my deer to a processor for the past 15-18 years but we decided last year we're not taking them to the processor anymore because their prices keep going up and we feel like they are either not giving us all of our meat back or giving us someone else's deer meat back because we've been missing a lot of the normal cuts that we should have got the past couple years which they haven't given us), plus now that we have a vacuum sealer we can package them ourselves and do as good/better job than the processor we've been using for so many years...

:popcorn:

I have no problem with this, wish I knew what you did for processing......

Adam

What I did for processing? What do you mean? What I did for quartering the deer? What I'm going to do tonight to cut it up / package it?

Just how to go about processing larger game in general. Never hunted.

Chicken is only experience.