Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

yes, poke holes through the foam, try using an apple corer . The roots will oxygen to survive too.

you would be best to poke holes and wash the dirt off mate

hey UT any advise you want to post on breeding redclaw feel free!
when i re set up in the new place i want to dedicate a barrel to them

I can see them jostling for position now

A test fill of my growbed uncovered the fact that I'm terrible with a silicon gun. Here's hoping second time lucky.

Second silicon job seems to have done the trick.

However I've had my clay balls floating for about 5 days now, and only a few have sunk, is there any trick to speed this process? I would imagine I'll have trouble running a f&d system with floating media...

Hey UT, don't worry about the clay balls floating, you only want to be flooding your beds to about 3-4cm below the top surface of the balls, not right to the top.. When you flood to below the surface they don't float up at all due to their weight...

They eventually sink though once they soak up with water, correct?

I'm not convinced that all of them will stop floating. I've had my system running since January with a mix of gravel and clay balls. If clay balls are dropped into standing water, some will still float. But as EB is indicating, don't fill the growbed completely.

EB, how are the clay balls working for larger plants? Do the plants fall over as the bed floods?

I don't think my Paw Paw (Papaya) would do so well in clay balls

I've got the growbed flooding and draining with a couple of seedlings in it. My auto-syphon isn't working too great, so I think I'll turn it into an overflow drain and put a timer on the pump. The pump allows flowback when it's off and acts as a syphon when off so will do the trick I hope.

UT, have you tried adjusting your in flow to get the siphon working better?

Yeah I have, but still no great luck with it. I picked up some new connectors today, am going to plug up the syphon all together, put in an overflow pipe. I've already got the timer for the pump and the pump's hose will syphon itself when the pump goes off.

Finally got the system stable. I'll post some pics up later, but the overflow pipe with the auto-syphon blocked up seems to have done the trick. Hopefully now the lettuce seedlings I put in there will stop dying from drying out

Here it is in what seems to be a functioning state. Will see how the plants go ..hopefully they'll take off. I did a water change from the turtle tank into the system, so should really kick off the nutrients.