our aquaponics

[Harrison Wayne Griffith]

Our Aquaponics

Ok all this is a new thing for me all the way around. I am not a writer or a farmer, but I am going to try to make a record of my family’s attempt to grow some of our own food. We have built a green house out of 1 inch pvc pipe and covered it with plastic. The plastic is temporary till I get some cash and buy the clear green house cover.

One view don’t look at my old tractor. In the next one you can see the side. The dimensions are 10’ X 16’ and about 9’ high in the center and 5’ at the side. We are going to add 10’ more to the end and them go off to form an L shape with another 10’ or more. We are on a fixed income and must move as funds become available .

 Here is a side view and one of the IBC totes we plan to use for fish. In this next picture I am trying to show you the inside of the green house . You can see some of the grow towers we made and plan on putting strawberry’s in them. These are the first grow towers I have made and if you look you will see that I had cut to many saw cuts and had to go back and plug them. They will still work and good looks will not grow the berry any better.

 

 

Here is a picture of the grow towers

I have seen another tower made in a you tube video and his are much nicer to look at and I think will work better than these so the next one I make will copy his. I will post that picture when I get it made.

Ok I have just gotten my order of clay beads so it is of to plant my strawberries.  We have the plants and all we needed was the beads.  I will post a photo of the towers when I am through planting them.

 

At this time the plants have been in the towers for 2 days and they seam to be doing well.  I was not sure that my water was getting all over.  I thought it may be going straight down and not getting to all the roots. But it looks like they are fine. 

   Now we don’t have any fish yet so I am cycling with ammonia and hope that will do if I see that my plants are not getting enough food I will get some hydroponics additives. But at this time I have some plants starting to grow. In this photo you can see a small cabbage plant starting it is only in the bed for 3 days at the time of the photo. The second photo is lettuce and it is 4 days in the bed. It took a day longer to come up. I will add photos of everything as they grow, good or bad. If I show the bad maybe someone will see it and tell me what I did wrong. Let us hope that there are not any bad.

Now here is my bath tube grow bed using gravel as a medium.

Well that is it for now.  I plan to add more as we add more.  My next thing will be to add 10 more foot of green house.  I will try to add photos of it going up.  Thank you all for any input.

    Well it has been about a month and I have had some trouble but I only lost one plant.  I now have it going I think. If you look at the cabbage plant in the above photo that is the before and here are some of the afters

This is Ethiopian cabbage at about 3 or 4 weeks.  Like I said I hit some trouble and things went bad but seam to be turning around for us now.

 here is the cabbage and the lettuce.  I have algae growing and I think it was hurting my plants so I covered the grow bed with a weed guard cloth. Hope it will cut down on the light getting to my water.  It must be helping because after I put it on the plant came back and are now growing in fact they get bigger over night.

This lettuce is about 3 to 4 weeks.  I am not sure how close to put thing and I am learning as I go.  A bath tub is not very big as gardens go.  Now here is a tomato plant started in the bed from a seed.

I am not a photographer eather so I cut off the top sorry I hope you get the idea anyway. Ok now for the strawberrys we are eating them and my wife will be making a strawberry cake this week.  The best part they came from our aquaponic garden they just taste a little bit better than what you can buy.  It maybe just in my head but that's ok. 

And last here are my bellpeppers these also started from seed in the gravel.  I thought we would lose them but they came back and are now doing ok.

That is it for now if anyone has some info on algee and what to do about it let me know.  By for now Harrison

 

[Richard Wyman]

Looks like you have a great start.  Looking forward to more as well.

[Sylvia Bernstein]

Nice job telling your story, Harrison.  thanks for sharing.  Looking forward to future updates