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What's happening to our plants?
We have a new system in place and are having some hiccups in our system.
We have an IBC tote setup: 3 growing beds, one sump bed and 1 large fish tank with only 10 tilapia in it at the moment. After cycling the system, we added the fish only to then have it be the coldest April in TX in a long time (easily 20 degrees below normal temp ranges). We actually lost 10 fish (had started with 20) due to cold temp swings. After rigging the fish tank with some aquarium heaters, we've been able to keep the fish tank above 60F despite temp dipping into the 40's and such.
We've had a hard time regulating our ammonia, nitrites and nitrates. The ammonia spiked when the cold weather shut down the bacteria and while the nitrites are rising and nitrates are now off the chart, the ammonia levels aren't going down. We still haven't had more than 2 days in a row of warm weather either. Today it's back to the 60's. We've barely fed our fish in the last week (2x) and they're small (most less than 6 inches).
Today's readings: Ammonia 8ppm, Nitrite 5ppm, Nitrate 80+ppm and pH is 7.0. But we also have a in-tank ammonia reader that says that the ammonia is low and normal.
Our plants were doing well, lettuce is doing fabulously. And then this last week we started noticing changes in our plants. Some of our tomatoes plants started breaking at the main stem. Leaves started changing color, yellowing. One of the watermelon plants has white spots. Basil is stunted, slow growth and looking off.
So, what are we doing wrong? Ammonia poisoning? Or is it the cold weather? Mineral Deficiencies? So many things that we don't know....we thought we had a handle on this but we're finding out this is more of a challenge than we thought it would be. We are both biologists, so we're up for the challenge!
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Harold Sukhbir on
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Hi Beth
"Today's readings: Ammonia 8ppm, Nitrite 5ppm"
These readings are toxic to fish and plants. So stop feeding altogether now! Your system has to recycle after losing its bacteria due to low temperatures. You should do a 50% water change right away, find some way to heat the system, put seed material( anything from another system eg. an aquarium) if available, and wait for the system to cycle. Your remaining fish may or may not survive the stress now in the short term or over time, sorry but you have to respond quickly in AP to avert trouble
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Permalink Reply by Beth Medeiros on
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We did a water change and the ammonia dropped to 4ppm. The fish are swimming around happy as can be, it seems. The bacteria seem to be working as the nitrite and nitrates have risen over the last few days. How long can it take for AP symptoms to show up in the fish?
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Hi Beth,
Please don't feed until you're at 0ppm ammonia/nitrites. Looks like your bacteria sprung back as your temps have risen? I know the fish are swimming but unless you get zero readings they won't be comfortable at all.
As far as symptoms? it's a gamble here, you can only wait and observe..........you should be lucky
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Did I say that I was impatient?
Got home from church to find a fish dead. My husband is optimistic that we can pull everything thru this...I'm not as hopeful. :( Obviously, NH4 was back up to 8ppm after the fish died. Sigh.... We have water decholrinating to make another water switch. It's definitely a learning curve. Thanks for the help.
On the good side...our lettuce and spinach is doing fabulous. At least we'll have salad to eat after all the hard work we've put into this system!
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Water question....
How do you handle water switch out when your tap water has 1.0ppm of Ammonia? We started testing the water today trying to see how much water change we needed to make to get the levels down. At 50% water change, we were still seeing 4.0ppm. At 90% change (yes, we know, unrealistic!) it was still over 1.0ppm. Turns out our tap water isn't making the water switch as effective as we need it to be. Maybe there's something else in the system that we aren't thinking of, but the ammonia just will not disappear, despite the bacteria working like gang busters.
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Hi Beth,
Please post your nitrite/nitrate values as well...........each day onward from today.
With a 50% change you get to 4ppm ammonia. At this level your system bacteria will not be as overwhelmed as they are at the moment and can consume the ammonia much more quickly than here at 8ppm. After this stage, as you have do have access to d-chlorinated water, you can gradually slowly add new water to the system while taking away the same amount, thus slowly reducing the remaining ammonia. You may or may not, still lose the remaining fish you have, but the only choice is to reduce the ammonia trying to get increasingly more manageable levels. If the bacteria are indeed present you will see decreasing values over a short period of time. Most of the systems I've have/had can give zero readings over 24 hours with a 3-4ppm ammonia dose however my temps are usually between 80-90F here in the tropics. I also adopt high feeding regimes keeping bacterial colonies in large numbers.
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Well, I'm glad we're at least headed into a few days of 80F weather. I'll just ignore the weather forecast for 54F on Thursday.... :)
The plan is to switch out at least 100 gallons of water tomorrow. It won't be 50% but it's the best we can do right now. Unfortunately, I can't lift the water myself tonight. We've pretty much realized that the few fish we have left will make it only thru a miracle. What we've discovered is that our town's water is horrible for fish tanks. We talked with a local fish store today and they have horrible times trying to regulate ammonia and pH in their tanks because of the town water. All this time we knew there was something that we were missing. It wasn't until we tested all the water sources in our house that we discovered that our tap water is 1.0ppm at least for ammonia. We were beginning to think the test kit was flawed. Until we tested the filtered water in the kitchen and suddenly, bright yellow!
Our readings today were 8.0ppm Ammonia, 5.0ppm Nitrite and 160ppm Nitrate. pH was 6.7. So nitrate increased, but nitrite has stayed the same.
Thanks so much for helping us with some advice. Eventually we'll get it all to work. We kept our lab equipment busy trying to figure this out today.
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Hi Beth,
Glad to see what you've discovered with some detective work. A 1ppm as a water source is workable for the future in your AP with careful monitoring. Whenever you top up the system with water for instance you will have to diminish the regular amount you would usually feed the fish and of course keep average temps steadish enough.
What we have available to us in AP, compared to most fish stores, is a much more efficient nitrogen conversion machine
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Well, there's some improvement :)
We managed to do about a 25% water change yesterday. We can only dechlorinate 100 gallons of water at a time. Today's reading show that the ammonia levels are between 2-4ppm, so I'm saying 3ppm. The color scales really annoy me when it doesn't fall into the right color block! Our nitrites are still 5ppm and our nitrates are 80+ppm. I was expecting the drop in nitrates, but was surprised that the nitrites didn't drop with the water dilution. I'm assuming now that they're a lot higher than we thought they were. :( Our pH is out of whack now too (low at 6.5) so we'll have to work on that tonight.
Plants seem to be holding their own, so I don't think we've ruined the system. The joys of a baby system!
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Permalink Reply by Alex Veidel on
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Sounds like my system during the winter :) Our well water pH runs at 8.0+, so I could only do water changes 50 gallons at a time. Now that the rain barrels have started up again I have all the water I could want :D Oh, you mentioned you did a pH change on Sunday and came back to a dead fish. What is your source water pH at? Doing a water change might have swung the pH too quickly and stressed out a fish.
Beth Medeiros said:Well, there's some improvement
We managed to do about a 25% water change yesterday. We can only dechlorinate 100 gallons of water at a time. Today's reading show that the ammonia levels are between 2-4ppm, so I'm saying 3ppm. The color scales really annoy me when it doesn't fall into the right color block! Our nitrites are still 5ppm and our nitrates are 80+ppm. I was expecting the drop in nitrates, but was surprised that the nitrites didn't drop with the water dilution. I'm assuming now that they're a lot higher than we thought they were.
Our pH is out of whack now too (low at 6.5) so we'll have to work on that tonight.
Plants seem to be holding their own, so I don't think we've ruined the system. The joys of a baby system!
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Hi Beth,
Please do not try to raise the PH level right at this moment, its best to wait awhile. Higher PH levels amplifies the effects of the ammonia in an AP system and after what has transpired recently you really don't want to add any more problems than you already have. Your Nitrites could still continue to rise even with the water changes so expect this as well. At 3ppm ammonia you're OK for today. Continue to do some more changes and we'll see how it goes.
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Today: NH3 - 1.5ppm (whoo hoo! It's coming down!), NO2 - 5+ppm and NO3 - 80+ppm
How worried do I need to be that the pH is down to 6.3?
And now we have another cold snap tomorrow night.
I'm trying to figure out how to protect the plants from 37F at night after a rainy cold day. We'll have the heaters on for the fish, but I so don't want to lose more plants. I already lost all my cucumber plants after the freeze we had in April. Please tell me that this isn't as consuming when the system is running correctly!
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