Ressurected System

Hi,

Having met up with a bunch of like minds Aquaponic types last weekend in Bangkok I decided to get my system out of mothballs.

Started setting it up yesterday and today. Gone away from the high level flood and drain system to a sump tank. I think in my case this should be much easier. Need now to get pump working properly.  The old one  lasted 5 minutes and died. Then I need to add stone to the grow beds and buy some fish. Going again for using Tilapia. Fairly hardy and it gets me up and running. To think Ive been sitting around here doing very little and had all this gear stuck in a store... Oh well no excuses now....

April 24th 2010 progress

Well... Progress. nothing much to report. All going well and no major problems.

I did have a minor difficulty with the flushing system. Seems for no apparent reason to stop flushing and just act as an over flow. Made me loose a few plants which dried up and died as a result. These were leaf plants but the tomatoes and chili plants survived. However it was an easy fix done by reducing the size of the outlet pipe at the bottom of the bottle outlet. Worked well since then.

We ate 5 cat fish a few weeks back and left the Tilapia to carry on in the tank. All fine and seem happy enough. Interestingly the amount of solid waste has reduced considerably. Not surprising as I had reduced the Bio mass by approximately 50%. (I.e removing the cat fish). So much was the difference in water clarity that I decided last week to dispense with the filter system and see if it made any difference. It consists of simple netting and some old geotextile I found laying about on my construction site.

So after 1 week I checked the pH. It was 7-7.5 today so thats OK. I do suspect that the plants are a bit short of nutrients as they appear a bit pale. But that could be me and my imagination just looking for something..... Produce has continued with chili, tomatoes and greens. My single paw paw is still hanging on in there. I really need to make a separate container for it to enable the roots to grow better. New project.

Recently I planted some coriander and last week some new narga super hot chilies. Will wait and see progress.