Help! My new adventure in gardening.

[Tom Parsons]

I have decided to convert my store into aquaponics.  It looked so easy.  The plants start to grow so fast.  Then they wilt.  LOL.  I would really be happy if i could get some good info.  We got the ph down from about 9 to 6.8 on average.  Am i to have a filter on these systems?  Please send lots of advice. 

 

Can you grow in a building with lots of windows?

 

Thanks

 

 

Tom

[Vlad Jovanovic]

Now keep in mind that the worms may not have enough to eat quite yet. (That's why we said "in the coming months , at any rate they should regulate their population according to the available food source so I wouldn't really worry about it a whole lot. Another thing you might not need to be overtly concerned with is lowering you pH so much. Both the fish as well as the bacteria dig the slightly higher pH (8-8.5 even). Really low pH might even inhibit them at this point as they are trying to get established and colonize.

It's only the plants that might not do so hot, but the plants probably should not be your main concern right now, establishing a good strong bacterial colony probably should be. Besides, the pH will come down on it's own with time due to the way in which the nitrification works. Now that you've taken out the concrete blocks out of the water, and gotten rid of your limestone media...

(Roughly, for 1mg of ammonia (NH4) that gets converted to nitrite/nitraets (NO2/NO3) it takes about 4mg of oxygen and 8.5mg of carbonate alkalinity (which is what usually makes source water have a high pH). So as that carbonate buffer in the water gets used up your pH tends to go down perpetually, until you have to intervene and add some sort of buffer to bring it back up (like hard pH high top-up water, or some sort of base like Potassium BiCarbonate [ KHCO3 ], or builders/slaked/hydrated/pickling lime (Calcium Hydroxide [Ca(OH)2 )...

[Tom Parsons]

Thank you