Month: June 2014

Post Views: 243 One of those things that you will eventually encounter in aquaponics is fish poop. While the short term problem with fish is that they “exhale” ammonia which needs to be nitrified or diluted to avoid a fish-kill, their solids waste is the long term problem. Now, fish solid waste (FSW) is generally pretty benign to us humans. Since fish are cold blooded, E.Coli et al are not threats. However, FSW that accumulates at the bottom of a well-stirred tank begins to aerobically decompose fairly rapidly. This is a double-hammer to the fish; this processes steal dissolved oxygen (DO) from the water, and release complex volatile organic compounds. Not enough DO or too much VOC in a fish tank is a fish kill in the making.…

Post Views: 119 A Different Sort of Seeding I opted to change how I planted the seeds this time. Instead of just broadcasting the seeds as I did last time, instead, I scraped the gravel back to the “wet zone”. The wet zone is the high-water mark of the growbed during the flood part of the flood-and-ebb cycle. It’s about 15 mm (0.6 in) below the surface of the pea gravel. The reason we don’t flood the bed all the way up to the surface is to keep blown-in weed seeds from getting started, and to prevent mildew and / or algae from starting. None of that is healthy or welcome for an aquaponics farmer. There seems to be a split decision in the Internet aquaponics community about…

Post Views: 125 Picky Pepper Plants As I noted in my video blog post in April , one of the mistakes I made was not understanding the best way to plant my grow beds. For much of the life of the system, the entire thing has been dominated by a forest of 60 cm (28 in) tall pepper plants. This shaded out everything else I planted; we got a couple of beans and a radish before the Great Pepper Rainforest blotted out the sky and cast everything beneath into deepest shadow. The other thing I didn’t clue in on was that peppers are tropical plants. The will not set fruit if the nighttime air temperature drops below 16C (61F). At night during winter, our basement auto-learning thermostat drops the air…

Post Views: 217 Hi there! Welcome back to the blog. Back in September 24, 2013 I wrote about the “basement scale” Aquaponics system that I built. It’s been a pleasant success in proving the concept. The fish are in excellent health with no mishaps at all, and there is an abundance of green that grows at a surprising rate. There have been some interesting things I’ve figured out along the way, observations I’ve made, as well as a major change. So, I’m going to talk about that first, so that anyone following behind me doesn’t make the same mistakes. Current state of the system Firstly, the fish “tank” made from one of the plastic totes has been replaced. The problem was that while the idea of the design was…