Tag: DIY

Post Views: 1,011 Introduction Howdy, folks. For those of you who followed along with my 2018 Notes series, or are following me via YouTube on the 2019 play list, I wanted to take a bit of time and get a blog post put together. This is going to be a combination of a “Build Walk”, a “State of the System” report, a “Hopes and Dreams” discussion, as well as whatever else comes to mind as I’m writing. Words of warning now; I expect this will be a long one. The build plan for 2019 As you likely recall from the 2018 Backyard Aquaponics, I had remarkably high Nitrate levels in the system all summer. Essentially, with 60 plants growing vigorously all season, I had heaps of “plant food”…

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Post Views: 334 Howdy folks! Welcome back to my blog series on aquaponics. In last the last post, titled “Not Quite Free” I discussed the idea that aquaponics isn’t really “free”. One of those things that I do try to keep in mind is that any my success in aquaponics is a result of “standing on the shoulders of giants”. Which is why I’m writing these blog posts. I’m hoping to help other folks who are interested in this remarkable sustainable farming technology. I’ve made some mistakes and I’ve tested some theories, and I want to make sure that anything I’ve learned or proven or tripped over winds up out in the collective record of the Internet community. Charcoal vs Biochar – The Important Detail So as I’ve…

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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.…

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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…

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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…

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