Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

gday everyone,
i had big plans a while back to do a crayfish system,
life got in the way and i sort of forgot about aquaponics and ended up doing nothing at all

anyway, instead of my master plan crayfish system, i have built a very small system over the top of my fishtank

ive had the fishtank going for years and atm 10 pet goldfish

im now the proud owner of 4 strawberry plants,
i bought them from bunnings and washed the roots in a litre of fish tank water so they had no potting mix on them (is that cheating)

i used rocks about the size of a 5cent piece for a bottom layer in the growbed and then i topped it off with typical small fishtank stones,
i spread the scum from my old filter over the stones and watered them in with fishtank water

how often should i flood the growbed?? i have it on a timer running for 15 minutes every hour
anything ive missed?

my first attempt at aquaponics,,, here it is.

Nicely done chooky.....

I'd be covering the tank and opening those curtains and giving the strawberries more light. they love sunshine.
other then that it should work well. the strawberries in my system are going crazy, i've had to chop back all the flowers to keep it growing the present buds into good sized fruit

a very neat n compact system chickenshit

very little direct sunlight hits this area.
i know thats a bit of a problem but its the best i could do at the time with what i have short of moving the fishtank to another part of the house.

i thought about feeding the hoses out through the window and do another setup out there damaging minimal amount of flyscreen but wouldnt be able to close window properly again.

anyway i hope itll work well. im a bit worried about rotting the roots with too much water on them all the time or rotting the bottom of the stem????

if you are flood and drain on a timer, I would be more concerned about lighting than root rot. You should be fine on the root part.

Nice looking system.

Wow that looks brilliant! very elegant looking indoor micro-AP system.

hey, thanks everyone, i appreciate the comments

it gets more light then the pics would lead you to believe. they were taken late afternoon.

everything seems to be sitting in there nice and strong and the roots have taken some sort of hold compared to how they felt yesterday when i put them in.
new growth is growing,
so far a success.

chookshit

nice system i would say u can just run it constantly i have basically the same thing goin on and it works great

ive decided to keep running it for 15 minutes every hour.
the top of the gravel is drying out just as the water starts to be pumped back onto it.
so far everything is looking good (nothing dieing) and the new growth are opening up.
this is my first system so im impressed that everything is living.

out of curiosity, if it was just gravel with tap or tank water being pumped over it without any nutrients in it, would the plants still be making progress in the first few days?

i think the pump i bought filters out the grit... i stirred the fishtank up and it turned brown with fish shit, but i dont see brown water being pumped up to the grow chamber when i do that.......its a cheap bunnings pump.

No

Unless you have fish in the system, like you have, then unless you're providing another ammonia source there will be no nutrients and ammonia generated and nothing to feed the nitrifying bacteria => no bacteria + no plant nutrients => no growth

In a soil system there's nutrients extracted from the soil and the water just provides the means to breakdown the nutrients and fuel the rest of the photosynthesis process....

In the question you asked ... no soil... no nutrients, no fuel for photosynthesis and other plant mechanisms => plant will eventually die.

fish poo rocks

well thats good to know. i thought it might just be growing off what it has stored within itself. ??

As you're probably not cycle yet that's probably true to some extent.... the existing fish waste and nutrient rich water and gravel you seeded your system (pipe) with is probably what's sustaining your plants initially.

And you do have fish in the tank... and I'd bet you're feeding them....

Be careful.... as you're not cycled the ammonia being produced by the fish probably isn't being processed/converted as yet.....

You could get an ammonia spike if you continue feeding.... do you have a test kit?

keep an eye on the internal pumps filter............it will even tually clog. I ended up just removing my filter from my pump completely