Despite my lack of blogging I have been pretty busy on the Aquaponic front. I was successful growing a giant amount of oregano and there was a little cilantro in there too. I also decided that instead of adding a second grow bed that I was going to change everything around and make one large grow bed and that grow bed was going to have a bell siphon. I have found that the loop siphon is not very reliable and with this product I found for the original grow bed it will be easy to do.
Below I tried to do a quick paint version of what it looks like. Basically the outside is just a strainer to keep the whole thing from getting plugged up. The inner most pipe is just one pipe that uses a uniseal to go all the way through the grow bed. And then there is the pipe that just goes over the top of the stand pipe, this helps provide the vacuum that helps drain all the water. So when the water fills up to the top of the drain pipe the water flowing through the whole system sucks the water out. You get really great drainage with this system. BTW all of the credit for this goes to another blog Affnan Aquaponics he developed the design I am using.
So I wanted to build a grow bed out of wood that would be lined with a pond liner to do all of this, after I went to Home Depot I realized that I bit off more than I can chew. Especially with the above mentioned time constraints. So I was looking around Home Depot as I tend to do when I need inspiration and I saw they had some of those giant Sterlite tubs, and we picked up our Christmas tree. When I tried to drill through that it cracked and was basically useless, never buy those things for this sort of application. So back to Home Depot I go and I found a rubbermaid tub. Like the one below, that I was able to drill a hole in that one fine.
So I am going to plant Lettuce, Sage, Cilantro, Dill, Spinach and Rosemary I think. I mostly picked them because they are the seeds that I had. I think I really should start germinating them and then adding them to the grow bed but I figured I would just toss them in and see what happened because it is going to be after Christmas before I will be able to have the time to germinating some seedlings, and by then we will know if the seeds have grown or not, so I might not have to. Originally I was going to plant just lettuce for the first round because it has a very short growing cycle but I decided it would probably be best to hedge my bet and plant a bunch of different stuff so I could see what would work and how well it works.
My next big announcement is that my land lord is not all that happy with my aquaponics endeavors in the kitchen. Not to say that he is going to tell me I can't do it, but he has his comic book collection stored below us in the basement and I can see how that would make him a little nervous. Anyway he has agreed to let me set up a green house in the backyard! I am going to have to get permission from the city of Somerville first though. I am hoping that I will be able to get the whole thing set up this summer. We will see how long it takes me to gather the funds necessary but I am excited!
I am debating on what sort of green house I should set up. Should I just buy one or should I build a hoop house? I have also heard that if you do a double layered hoop house you can grow year around even as far north as Canada. So I am hoping that this might be able to get year around growing, obviously I am going to have to keep it at a reasonable temp because I won't be able to take all of the fish out and move them somewhere else of the winter. So this is a big step that I really need to think about before we start buying things because everything will be on a pretty large scale considering the space I have to work with. I am also going to try to automate as many of the processes as possible such as temp control in the water and the air, fish feeding, lights, pumps ect.
There are about a million details to work out but that is all part of the fun.
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