A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners

Coconut medium

Good morning fellow beginners,

I will be setting up a combination system that will consist of verticle, hydropnics in PVC pipe and a regular media bed. The media that I will be using will come from the coconut fiber since it is very easy to find in the Philippines.

I am researching everyday for differant options mainly for the education aspects but has anyone set up this type of combination system before and if so what were the results?

0 members like this

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by TCLynx on August 5, 2011 at 7:03am

I would recommend sending filtered water to the towers or you are likely to see some major slimming/clogging issues in the tops of the towers or clogging to the feed pipes to the towers.

Coconut medium can be a rather challenging one to use. There are so many different versions of it but the primary problems seems to be;

1-it turns the water brown making it hard to see fish and skewing the water test readings.

2-it could affect pH

3-it will break down in the nitrogen rich water

4-it will stay too wet and give problems with root rot and aeration.

5-some types seem to cause issues with germination.

Now there are people who have managed with coconut medium anyway because it is what they had to work with but the above listed are some of the things you need to be ready to deal with.

Permalink Reply by John Allison on August 5, 2011 at 7:10am

Thank you for the feed back and I will keep that in mind. My research tells me that the meduim has a zero PH factor. I will see when I run my test and go from there. I will post my findings on my combnation setup for future referance for the group.

TCLynx said:

I would recommend sending filtered water to the towers or you are likely to see some major slimming/clogging issues in the tops of the towers or clogging to the feed pipes to the towers.

Coconut medium can be a rather challenging one to use. There are so many different versions of it but the primary problems seems to be;

1-it turns the water brown making it hard to see fish and skewing the water test readings.

2-it could affect pH

3-it will break down in the nitrogen rich water

4-it will stay too wet and give problems with root rot and aeration.

5-some types seem to cause issues with germination.

Now there are people who have managed with coconut medium anyway because it is what they had to work with but the above listed are some of the things you need to be ready to deal with.