Aquaponics In Paradise Meetup #4

[Albert]

more pics

[Albert]

3/3 of loveland

[Albert]

olomana

[Albert]

57 - pineapple fruiting after only a few months!  usually takes 2 years!

64 - giant taro and tapioca plant (only 7 months old!)

[elaidlaw]

For those of you who were able to attend the meet-up today, could you please share the one or two things that you learned or impressed you... for the benefit of those of us who were unable to come. Thanks.

[justhink]

It was a great meetup today. I got confirmation of how much I don't know again. That's ok though. I also now know that I want to continue learn more about aquaponics.

The worms are a very interesting part I found exciting. They are the reason Glenn doesn't have a smelly farm even with all the livestock he has.
Imagine that, NO FLIES. That alone makes this even more attractive to me. Glenn gives a great informative tour of his farm.

I am currently tweaking my system before I start test running the water through it.

I'm going to have my FT water overflow into a floating bed which will overflow into my cinder GB which will Bell Siphon into a sump which then gets pumped back into my FT.

[Albert]

Justhink, are you saying you are going from your FT to raft, then to your cinderbed?  I think you should consider going to cinderbed then raft so the solid waste gets cleaned out.

[justhink]

Yeah Albert I kind of saw that at Glenn's farm. I thought Stan at WFS had his setup that way so I wanted to copy it.
But your right I'll have to refigure my setup with the FT overflowing into the cinder GB first then into the raft.

Thanks for confirming that.

[justhink]

After waking up a little more this morning I thought of why I was going to stick with my setup.
This thinking is why I was going to follow through with my setup as is.
What do you guys think?

Hey Albert, wouldn't the solids still go through to the cinder bed anyway? I just thought about that. Would the solids do any harm to the raft system?

[Albert]

I think you forgot to explain the reason why?

All the solids will clog up the roots, what doesnt clog up the roots will go to the cinder bed.  Have you seen how long the roots are?

[wolfythelobo]

Aloha everyone!!!
Thank you so much for sharing pics of the meeting, I'm so excited to see all these people gathering to share and learn  I wish I could have made it. but...I will have to ask you guys.
Regarding the set up, I want to add my 2 cents...My set up goes from FT to GBs then to a cinder box and back to FT.  Everything is growing crazy, the roots are beautiful no more gunk especially after the water fleas came and new air pump and stones, I guess aeration in the GBs helped tremendously.  my purple taro is growing so big and fast as they filtrate the water before entering the FT I'm also using Dutch buckets to grow tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and some other things, and I split from the cinder box to FTs and buckets I'm also doing vertical wall growing in PVC pipes and also working on using pipes along the GBs vertically.
I should post pics...
Mahalo

[Albert]

craptastic... my xti died after transferring these pics...
no new pics until i can get it fixed or buy a 500d   =(

[justhink]

To wolfythelobo, are you running your FT to a floating raft then to a cinder bed?

[Hooked-On-Ponics]

2 benefits to running your DWC after your Cinder would be Filtration and Aeration.  Not saying it's wrong to do it inversely, because if it works...Great!  However, plants will generally do better if water is filtered prior to entering your DWC....less chance of solids on your roots causing root rot.  I have seen a system that runs FT to DWC to Cinder, but he uses a prefilter prior to his DWC and has to constantly clean the filter.

If you have yet to build your system anyways, why not run the Cinder before DWC.  Is there a reason you want to do it DWC first???

[justhink]

Hooked-On-Ponics, I saw that Stan at WFS had his setup with the DWC then the cinder bed. He said that UH had set it up that way for him. Stan says it works good. I also assume that the cinder bed would suck too much of the nutrients up to be useful in the cinder bed.

I'm just guessing here now.