Today, the update is about the progress of my little homemade aquaponic growth vegetables.
Firstly, there had been a failure to anticipate how tall the plants can grow and the strength of the winds.
Let me show you the current photos of the vegetables.
Top Bucket 29 Mar 2009
Bottom Bucket 29 Mar 09
You can see the Bottom Bucket had half of the vegetable was gone due to my own fault, the plants got too tall and fell sideways touching the water that is coming down from the hoses.
The end result is death to all my “kang kong” vegetables, I was devastated at first then realized the top bucket is suffering from the same problem of weak stems and need some sticks to support them individually.
I uses some old wooden chopsticks & small wire to tie them upright to prevent them from falling over, the result of the rescue is the photo above on the top bucket.
Those on the top bucket is majority are “ladyfingers” vegetable and a small number of them are “chili padi”.
I will continue to update on this project and hopefully able to harvest them…but I am not experienced enough to know if they are ripe for harvest…any advice will be helpful!
I had modified the double barrel fish protector filter for my water pump to point upwards instead so that there won’t have any possible chance of over flowing anywhere since the amount of water are limited to the water level above the barrels.
My molly fishes had actually given birth to many small babies!! ^_^
I fed them 2 times daily with algae wafer and they seems to be flourishing well
More updates will be found in my project page of this blog!
The DIY Indoor Aquaponic Growth System status report on the growth of my vegetable garden. 1. Kang Kong is growing up pretty fast… 2. Xiao Bai Cai is spreading all over the place Let me write a small review on this setup and the problems encountered & unsolved problems. Aquaponics is a combination of hydroponics and Aquatic fish breeding to make a 90% to 100% maintenance free. The benefits of my set up is as follows
Save lot’s of space
Able to plant vegetables indoor
The vegetables can be sheltered from extreme weather such as winter, hurricane, drought and etc.
Scalable expansion depending on your building weight limits on the floors.
Can be used outdoors as well
Quite hassle free, just need to feed the fish…the rest is automatic. (Maybe get an auto feeder!)
Almost “Free” Food
Fish waste as fertilizers means it’s Organic vegetables (No pesticides or natural gas fertilizers)
The disavantages are
Slightly expensive to setup initially especially during trial and error
Need some knowledge on fish breeding
Troublesome to build if you are unable to gather all the components.
There are some problems that I had encountered previously during the set up process and mistakes made that cost me some money to replace the “Ikea Snail Buckets” because I had drilled holes into the bucket wrongly making the set up noisy and very annoying.
First problem that I had faced was the noise, the splashing noise can be heard from the next room if there was no stone pebbles inside the buckets. After reviewing some other people’s setup such as ninamichelle77‘s video on her Aquaponics System,
I had decided to follow her hose design with slight modification. Then the second problem is the water pump sucking fishes into it’s “final destination” and end up in heaven, I managed to connect a “fish protector” from the pump to prevent small fish from premature death ^_^.
The third problem is the risk of clogging at the drainage hole (hose connector) inside the bucket from small pebbles, I managed to find a small tea strainer to cover up the hole to prevent any small stones from clogging the opening and able to cover the whole strainer with stones without clogging!
The fourth problem is the loud drainage noise that happens every time when the water flow is large hence I installed a valve to the setup to control the flow of water and the noise just disappeared!
The current pending problem is the top bucket is still not very well irrigated which probably delayed some of the growth, I am still thinking of ways to improve the water flow and currently testing if lowering the platform can slow the water flow and irrigate the top bucket better.
The plants is doing great and the molly fishes are doing rather well in the tank The wild common mollies are very good jumpers hence I had to cover the top part of the fish tank using some plastic cut out cover but still 1 or 2 still jumps out occasionally at some small openings…but it’s not a serious problem for now.
The common mollies love algae wafer & flake fish food hence I have no problem breeding them but I will love to get my hands on a tilapia (Japanese fish) this weekend if possible but I know recently the weather is terribly hot causing many fishes to die in the drains…saw a few floating tilapia last weekend!
Ok, that’s all for today’s update…stay tune for my next update probably a few more days before I post again on this project. My next project might be very interesting, it might be a project on water & sun…stay tuned!
Today I will begin to set up an Indoor Hydroponic using a slightly modified design from garden girl tv version.
Firstly, I had mentally drawn up a plan and decide what items to purchase and the current design is to have a pump to pump water from the fish tank below up 2 meters to the highest point and let the water flow from right to left in a plastic grow tank before draining to another grow tank and down back to the fish tank.
This is what I had set up in 2 hours time for today
The following is the list of items that I had bought for this project
Metal rack that I had bought at SGD $148
Metal Racks that I need to install myself hee
Water pump motor and accessories with tubes and connectors at SGD $135.
Energy Saving Water Pump
Two IKEA Snail box at SGD $12 each
IKEA Snail Box
Two 55 Watt PL Lights for fish tank
I already have 3 x 2 feet fish tanks at home so I can re-use one of the fish tank for this project
The task for tomorrow is to drain my existing fish tank and catch the shrimps to migrate them to another fish tank which will take about forever haha!.
12 Feb 2009
I had finally finished catching all the cherry shrimps (hundreds of them) and migrated them to another fish tank.
Draining the tank makes the tank lighter for me to carry but it’s still straining my back slightly!
I almost hurt my back carrying it onto the bottom rack.
Adding the water must add a few drops of anti-chlorine solution to remove the chlorine from our tap water, using some “crystal clear” solution to make the dust settle down in the water I started to drill some holes at the bottom of the IKEA Snail Boxes.
Tied some raffia strings to the new 55 Watt Lights to the metal racks on top of the 2 snail buckets for growing the vegetables.
Lights Tied up & ready to grow stuff!!
I will be catching some Tilapia fish (aka Japanese fish) that shit a lot and put in the fish tank so I can use it’s fish waste as fertilizer for my vegetable plants.
