Am i talking myself out of this or not. Could use some input

[Jeffrey Ludwick]

I live in NE Ohio and if you dont know about the region, it gets cold and it lasts a long time.

I am very interested in starting a system with 4 grow beds that are 4x8.  I really must have this system outside and i do not have a greenhouse.  I have not read anything about keeping a system like this "alive" during the winter without either moving it indoors or having a greenhouse. 

I guess it seems that having to cycle the system every spring would really cut down on the viable growing period during the fall and winter months.

Anybody have experience with this and/or have thoughts and suggestions

 

[TCLynx]

I believe you can manage something but you will have challenges to overcome.

[Keith Rowan]

i'm in northeast ohio too.. after one summer, i moved it into the basement and decided it's gonna stay down there

if you bury your tank, you could probably get fish through the winter, lightly stocked, and using a stock tank heater and aerating..

and i imagine it would cycle up pretty quickly the second summer..

[Damon Polta]

if you really want to keep it alive... heaters... tons of heaters... as keith said if you burry the tank you might stand a chance... it just depends on how harsh the winter gets... this past year we were spared the normal harshness of the winter. THANK GOD! lol.

a cheeper solution that a green house is building a hoop house... they aren't as insulated, but they will do better than leaving it to the elements...

vise versa, for our summers, you'll need to find a way to keep things cool if you build a hoop house. the july and august heat and humidity will be chaos on leafy greens... they'll wilt...

by the way, i'm currently living about 20 minutes south of cedar point, and i spend a great deal of time in sandusky as i work there and i have family in the city.

i traveled to hawaii, and they marveled at the stories as to how bad the weather gets here, both too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter... and since you're east of me, your winters are typically a bit worse than ours are.

and speaking of the weather, how'd you guys out east fare in this last set of storms? i just found out today that they added a whole new set of colors to the warning spectrum to more correctly calculate and show the severity of the weather... we got some of the purple stuff today according to the radar, it was crazy. lol.

[Jeffrey Ludwick]

thanks for the encouragement and input everybody. 

I was thinking that the grow beds need to be protected from the freezing temps to keep the bacteria alive and the pond unfrozen to keep the fish alive. Is that a fair assumption?

The storms were more flash and noise than substance, and thats why i choose not to live in Lake, Ashtabula, or Geoga counties.  Always getting dumped on!

Damon, is that your stuff in the background of the avitar?

[Bob Campbell]

My pond gets down mid 50F in the winter.  The Koi Live and I feed them sparingly in the winter, but the bacteria dies or goes completely dormant.  This is not a problem due to the cold temperature, but it's takes a while before the bacteria return.  I know this because I have tried to use the gravel from the pond to start the bacteria in an aquarium.  It did not help.   I have done that same thing in the Summer and it allowed me to quickly cycle an aquarium in 4 days.

So Winter is  not an ideal time to be growing, but it seems to work out. The pond is 1300 gallons with about 30 16" Koi so there is a fair amount of fish waste,  but when it warms up the bacteria slowly begin to grow and I do not see spikes of Ammonia, Nitrite,or Nitrate as I feed the fish more and more food.

In the Summer I feed them about 1 quart of food per day.

[Jeffrey Ludwick]

I guess my biggest reservation is the cycling the system in the spring after the winter cold.  I am afraid i will spend a majority of time cycling the grow beds instead of growing.  Does this make any sense? or am just reading too much with no proactical experience?

[Damon Polta]

sadly to say no, the stuff in the background is not mine. that picture was taken back when i was the manager of the Friendly Aquaponics farm back when they were supplying lettuce to costco... i have not worked for them for a little over a year and a half now...

from where we live, if we had a standing water source left outside throughout our winters, animals in it or not, without heaters, the water would freeze solid if left above ground. our average winter temp last winter was around 27F, which is unusually high... this was the mildest winter i have ever lived through in this area... normally we get over 10' of snow annually and the temps drop down below the -30's during some storms thanks to the windchill factor... aa few years back we hit the mid -40'sF during one particularly violent winter wind storm... and with the lake and the way the weather travels, the cleveland area (north east ohio) get's it worse than we do where i live... their snowfall is worse, their temp. shift are normally worse... its a west - east thing... where the farther east you are on the lakes edge, the worse the winters are.

solar heating is mostly out of thw question up here during the winter... constant cloud cover most of the time... yes, there are a few days during the winter hwre we get sunlight... but that's mainly because the atmosphere is too cold to produce clouds... so when the sun does come out, it's generally colder than normal... lol. the sun in the winters up here gives us false hopes.

but back to on topic... if you heat the water to around 50 as stated above for the 3-4 months where it gets super cold things will be ok. the highest electric bills will probably be in feb.- march where the weather just bottoms out before spring.

[TCLynx]

I know there are people running systems that have to let them go dormant for the winter and then cycle them up in spring.  I don't think cycle up the next year is usually as bad as it is the first season and the truth is, you can only really cycle up and get feeding going as fast as the season warms up anyway so while it is kinda a pain, it may not be totally unreasonable.  Especially if you can insulate the beds to an extent (kinda like people do with worm beds in extreme cold climates) the bacteria may largely die off but some of it will be dormant to help kick start cycling the next spring.

[Jeffrey Ludwick]

I remember the -40's winter.  I grew up in the desert of Texas and 60 is cold to me, but a guy will do strange things for love.  My wife grew up here, so she thinks were home.  I usually B & M about the weather from about Oct to April every year.  

Any way, i was looking at geothermal as a method of keeping the fish tank from freezing, but the cost is just about as much as erecting a greenhouse.  I'm looking for people that have had dormant systems in the coldest part of winter and their stories for beginning the cycling process in the spring.