Aquaponics plant cloning / rooting - All is doing well.
The rosemary sprigs have gone crazy with roots in now, their 3rd week. Even the tiny pieces I tore off the buried part of the stem have rooted.
The tea is alive and ‘stable’ but no roots yet. This supposedly takes 8 weeks to root in the best of conditions.
The basil is well rooted and growing.
The mint, which has been there for a while, has plenty of roots.
The media bed seems to be providing a good to great environment of moisture, nutrients and oxygen for cloning plants, better than I had expected.
The other plants in pots I put there about 10 days ago are getting moisture and doing well. The pot in the front (rosemary) was not deep enough in the gravel and was too dry. I buried it deeper in the media. The basil in the pot was looking bad when put there and now looks great. I poked holes in that pot as it had none.
Big tank was getting low. I added about 5 gallons of pH’d and dechlor water and put about a gallon in the small tank. Tanks could use a plecostomus. I’ll look for a couple.
Tank chemistry is good with no ammonia and 20 - 40 ppm nitrate. pH was getting back up to around 8. I had been getting it slowly to 7 over the last two weeks with incremental phosphoric acid. I adjusted it back to about 7.4 today. Should be maybe 6.5. I was using a colorimetric measure but I have ordered a digital pH meter - will be WAY quicker and more accurate. Nitrate level means we could support way more plants, which is no surprise as we have very few. Baby marms in small tank looked good. I did not notice the one in the big tank but did not look for her.
Rosemary / roots and other - media bed
Other equipment
I left a siphon pump (red handle) and a 4 cup plastic measuring cup (on side of white water bucket) for bio use. The siphon pump is crummy but it does sort of work. Easier to use the measuring cup to just scoop water into the tanks. The water in the white bucked has been pH neutralized to 7 and dechlorinated.
The 4" x 5' PVC pipes leaning in the back I have gotten to put together some vertical AP media beds. I need to cut a 1" slot in the pipes as marked on the pipes. Was going to use the table saw but have not taken the wood shop orientation although I think I could do it safely. If someone wants t o proctor me on that (or just do it) then let me know but want to follow the rules until I can get oriented. Basically it is a 1" slot that needs to be ripped along the PCV with two cuts on each pipe as marked.
This is what I am making (except the DIY version for $15-20 per tube rather than $70!)
Extra pump - I found this in a drawer in the bio area and tested it and it works. I left it out to dry out but it goes into one of the plastic drawers.
Cool! As I get more time, I’d love to help out over here. Out of curiosity, has anyone considered building a fluid bed filter / nitrate converter to run the water through?
With these small tanks, it wouldn’t take a huge amount of pumping to fluidize sand in a small column (1.5" PVC?) of aerated water. Then you could run a continuous system for the new vertical grow bed.
More filtration is on my to-do list. I have been looking recently at fluidized media filters, specifically ones that use the K1 media since I saw one on craigslist. I then looked for a DIY version as the one on craigslist was probably overkill but the idea was pretty cool. I’ll research the option for using sand. It certainly provides a tremendous surface area for nitrification, something like 1000 m^2 per m^3.
BTW, keep on the lookout for some sort of small plastic scrap that can be had in bulk for a media filter. That’s all that K1 or other media like bio balls really are. There may be some sort of little plastic chip of waste material that is being thrown away from some manufacturing or commercial process that we could use. Would also want it to be bio and food safe for our purposes.
Your thought is particularly relevant since I have recently begun to study some of the hydroponic principles that are particularly important for success. Aquaponics is just a subset of hydroponics but generally assumes the nutrient water is very clean. Deep water culture and ‘aeroponics’ are hydroponic applications that require extremely clean water. If we choose to use those, then we will need better filtering.
Some sort of a solids ‘swirl filter’ is also in the works and would be upstream to the fluidized media filter.
I hope your pleco’s made it ok, but if not, give me a shout, as my bristlenose plecos recently had babies and they will probably be big enough in another couple of weeks to safely move. Heck, even if the ones you bought made it, I would still be happy to donate a few babies to the tank, just let me know.
Great, turns out I also got the bristlenose. Don’t know much about them. I ordered 5 but they sent 8 and they all survived. They are about 2 cm long. I was a little concerned about whether or not the marmokrebs might try and eat them but the consensus on the web seems to be that they will probably leave them alone if the crayfish have other food.
Thanks, Andrew, for the work cleaning up the Bio area including cleaning the big tank. Looks great!. It is beginning to come together a bit. I may get out there tomorrow. I’ll text and let you know.
