roots stopping up bell siphon

[timothy dillon]

  I recently came home to find water overflowing from my plant bed into my fish tank. Upon inspection I found a mass of roots inside of my bell siphon preventing the flow of water through it. It had a small trickle but that was all. I cleaned out the roots and it solved the problem. 

 My question is how do i solve this problem. Does anyone have any advise? Is there some type of barrier that will prevent this or should i add this to my maintenance schedule? ( i have already done this) By the way, my grow bed-4x 3.5- has 2 very prolific cucumber plants 2 tomato plants and 2 pepper plants. I also have a small raft system the did very well with lettuce earlier in the year and another small drain and flood bed with hydrotin as a media instead of gravel like my primary bed. I'm deliberating on a couple more drain and flood beds because my tank is an 185 gallon IBC container. I plan to place the new beds outside of my greenhouse. I don't know when I started rambling but I love this stuff and I am anxious to hear if there is a solution to the root invasion problem.

 I live south of Sanderson, Fl and would like to see what a real system looks like.

[TCLynx]

Installing overflows in beds just in case of a clogged siphon is not a bad idea.  Just beware that over Flows need to be fairly large to be effective in a real emergency.  If your stand pipe is 1" make your overflow bigger.

Add checking the siphons for roots to your regular schedule!  All drains need regular checking!  If you have a barrier that will stop roots, it will clog and stop water flow too so it is not an appropriate option.

The BYAP method of dealing with roots in the drain area is to give your gravel guard a 1/4 turn every couple weeks to cut off invading roots but this only works if your gravel guard is sturdy enough yet free moving enough to allow movement.  It won't work if your drain goes out the side of a bed instead of the bottom and heavy irregular gravel might now allow easy turning of the guard.

ALWAYS make DRAINS ACCESSIBLE for cleaning roots will go there so you need to be able to clean them out.

[timothy dillon]

  thank you very much. all this info is very helpful. I'm going outside now to turn my gravel barrier a quarter turn. thank you again.

[Rob Torcellini]

Just like TC said, a quick turn of the media guard will do it.  If there are a lot of roots, remove the bell and pick out the larger roots by hand...the rest of the debris will just wash out.

My beds that have cukes have roots in them on a regular basis...they have a monster root system and grow very fast!

[TCLynx]

When I had corn growing in some beds, I had masses of roots grow down the stand pipes to the point of blocking the 1 1/2" drain line, when I pulled the stand pipe to clean it out, the 3' long clot of roots went down the 3" combined drain and I found it floating in the fish tank, on first glance out of the corner of my eye it scared me (how the heck did a dead 3 foot juvenile alligator get in my fish tank?!?!?!?!?!!?!  as in where is MOM!)  Now I know I need to check and make sure the beds are draining properly every couple weeks, expecially when I grow certain plants like corn or lufa.