Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Aquaponics - Next stage completed - May 2011


Gradually the system is taking shape. This was one of the bigger obstacles and I managed to overcome it today with a bit of an extra hand from my brother to get the second bench in position. I also painted the benches with metal paint to give them a new resilience to the weather. All up I can fit 11 grow beds along the benches. That is approximately 1100 litres of water for my roughly 800 litre fish tank. I am anticipating adding another tank to the current one in the near future and may need to utilise only half of the grow beds until the system is completely hooked up in it's entirety.


After playing around with the pond and some aquaponics I have settled on this little set-up for the time being. It has been in situ around about a fortnight I think and already the strawberries are growing new leaves and the lettuce is coming on strong after limping for about two days. The real surprise was how much better the pond water looks. I'm not quite sure how it could clear so soon given that there are not that many roots in the system yet to pick up nutrients but perhaps it is just the water being filtered through the expanded clay alone that has cleared it. I have the pump off for around an hour and pumping for about a half hour. Currently there are I think seven marron in the pond and about a dozen feeder fish that bred up in the pond from our four goldfish.

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