A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners
My System for now
I have been up and running for a few months now and it is doing well. I have a 125 gallon fish pond, 50 gal flood tank, and 6 18 gal grow beds. I have gold fish in the pond and I grow peppers in the beds.
This is how it started .
And here is how it is looking now.
I have a green house kit in storage right now. I will be putting it up when I pull up my veg garden since that is where it will go. I plan on getting a IBC and 3 55gal pickle barrels cut in half for grow beds and 3 for the flood tank. I hope to raise Tallapia in this system. i think I will keep the smaller set to raise cole crops this fall and winter.
This is my blog that chronicles the system from inception.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by deepblu505 on
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I am using pea gravel and i had it delivered from a landscaping company.
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Permalink Reply by Jim Troyer on
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Hi Deep Blue Looks like you have the AP sickness bad...enjoy!
I am interested in the soda bottle valve you have set up there, what are doing with it? Can we have better photos? I had hoped there would be some photos of the valve on your blog but no...
bwt: wish I could join you for a yak surf lesson, that looks like a hoot!
Jim
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Hey Jim the yak surfing is a blast.
I will take some better pictures of the flood valve tomorrow and post them. It is pretty simple , It is a soda bottle with a hole in the cap and the bottom cut out. It is connected via fishing line over two wheels to a toilet tank valve. There is a tube coming out of the flood tank at a height that will fill the grow beds when it empties. The tube directs the water that over flows through it to the bottle. As the bottle fills up, the weight of the water in the bottle overcomes the weight of the water in the tank holding the valve closed. This then essentially flushes the tank through the tee valve at the bottom then to the grow beds. As the water drains out of the bottle the weight of the valve over comes the weight of the empty bottle and closes the valve to stop the flow to the beds.
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Here are some pictures from this morning:
This shows the bottle and the overflow tube.
This is the hole in the cap of the bottle.
This shows the line ans the safety pin holding it.
Better look at the pin and swivel.
The wheels are from a sliding door repair kit.
This is shot of the toilet tank valve. The rusty piece you see are washers that I added fro weight to help the valve close when the water empties from the tank.
And here are several form the grow beds , as you can see the peppers really seem to like the growing in the system.
This bed is sort of experimental, I have celery growing from the bottom of a celery I bout at the store. Also some Okra And some onion that are growing from the bottoms of green onions I also cut off others.
In the above are tomato's that were suckers pinched off my garden tomatoes, and more Okra and onions.
Here are just some of the pepper on the plants. I have already canned 7 pints of pickled hot peppers.Won't be long before I need to put some more up.
I hope that explained it for . If you have any other questions about the system don't hesitate to ask. That said I am very new to AP systems and I am learning as I go.
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Thanks for the details, looks like it works well too.
Your system looks like a real jungle, well done!
jim
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Thanks Jim, it is doing very well. I am a bit surprised at it. I really just started as an experiment, something I saw on Pinterest. Then I decided to build a bigger system to raise fish for personnel consumption. The gold fish started out as cat fish bait. Hope to have the larger system up and running before it gets cold.
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Permalink Reply by Keith Rowan on
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keep an eye on that bottlecap hole.. it will have a tendency to clog
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You are right Keith it does tend to get clogged with algae and crap, I clean it out every so often, or replace it with a new cap, seem to have a plethora of those. Native Texan with a mild Dr Pepper addiction....
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