Photography - Rock melon time lapse

 thought I might do a time lapse of a rock melon developing.

I'm not sure why, but I like rock melon a lot.

The might be called cantaloupe in your part of the world.

Either way, I have some growing.

The shot looks a bit like this.

 The white splodge at the bottom is the time lapse camera.

It's facing toward the extremity of the rock melon vine centre top.

The plan is to capture a rock melon forming from scratch.

Apparently I have around a month. With that time in mind, I've set the camera to take a frame every so often.

I really dont know how often, but having set it up, I'm loathe to change anything because it would mean the loss of all the pics to date.

That's the big problem with this camera. You don't really know when it's working or not. It even pretends to be working when there is no memory card installed. That means it seems to be working, and it only takes a month before you realise the thing doesn't have a card in place.

One month to take a picture of nothing.

Oh well. It hasn't happened so far, so I guess it isn't really a problem.

This is the topic up close.

Currently it's a hand fertilized flower in the last stages of it's flowery existence.

Hopefully, over the next few weeks, we will see a rock melon grow to harvest.

If not, there is a strawberry runner incoming from stage left that might make for a decent set of time lapse images.



Or not.

Who knows?

A month or so from now, all will be revealed.



120 Things in 20 years - Bringing you time lapse images of rock melons. That's it really. Time lapse images of rock melons.

Aquaponics - Short siphon

A bell siphon usually dumps all the water from an aquaponics grow bed. It does this by creating a siphon once the water gets to a certain level.

The cool thing about it, is that once triggered, it lifts water up and over a standpipe, and does this until the grow bed has drained. This gives us our flood and drain cycle in our grow bed.

One alternative to using a bell siphon, is to run your crow bed as constant flood. To do this all we have to do is remove the bell, and leave the water to reach the level of the standpipe, and circulate.

It seems constant flood has some advantages.

A constant flood system holds more water, so might be a bit more stable. Whenever anything changes in a system, having more water means that it tends to change more slowly. There is also probably a bit more real estate for the micro beasties to live in.

Most plants don't seem to mind so it looks like a thing worth doing on at least some grow beds if you have more than one.

I only have one, and its very stable, but my fish are getting bigger, so there might come a time when I'm running my system a bit closer to its fish holding capacity. With this in mind I'd like to maximise my system's ability to deal with the extra load.

One possible problem with constant flood, is that over time it might be more likely for areas to become stagnant. Constant flood pulls water from the top. If you are adding water to the top and taking it from the top, the water might ignore your desire to move through the system, and just take a short cut straight from the inlet to the outlet.

A system using a bell siphon drains in a fairly dramatic fashion as all the water is dumped, often a lot faster than it went in. This sucks a lot of air down into the media, and also creates a powerful surge throughout the system. The strong surge might help to distribute solids away from the water inlets, spreading them more evenly through the grow bed. A siphon pulls water from the bottom, and this might also aid in distributing nutrient evenly.

Constant flood = good
Flood and drain = good.

I hate the way the universe can do that sometimes. Make up your mind universe.

In an effort to greedily get the best of both worlds, I have changed my siphon a bit.

The small tube on the outside is an air breather pipe. It's purpose is to aid the siphon to stop in a decisive manner. If your siphon doesn't match your pump flow, there can be a condition where, at the end of the cycle when your siphon should stop, it continues to trickle out water at the same rate that the pump is pumping in. (see this post on calibrating a new bell siphon)

This means you system can be stuck on empty.

Plants and bacteria hate that.

If your plants and bacteria aren't happy, your fish are miserable.

When the water level gets down to the breather pipe, it suddenly sucks air and stops the siphon. Basically it just makes the siphon a bit more forgiving.

What this means, is that we can mount that breather pipe further up the bell, and when the water empties to that level, the siphon stops.

So now we can have a situation where the only 20% of the grow bed is drained, but it is still drained with a powerful surge, and it also still drains from the bottom. This may well provide a decent compromise.

I have a feeling plants will enjoy having their feet always wet, but their knees in flood and drain.

I'll let you know if anything terrible happens.

Aquaponics - Duckweed auto feeder side view

To add clarity to the previous post, here is a side view animation of the duckweed auto feeder.

Aquaponics - Split system

A rule of thumb ratio to stick to is 2 grow bed : 1 fish tank. This allows a big enough population of nitrifying bacteria to process the maximum safe population of fish.

The maximum safe limit of fish population is 3 kg for every 100 litres of water. since a litre of water weighs 1kg, we can say that 3 % of the fish tank's weight can be made up of fish. That's a lot of fish for a cubic meter of space.

The issue with the 2:1 ratio of grow bed to fish tank, is that the grow bed takes a very large percentage of the fish's water. I'd like to grow some marron as well as all these fish, so I'll want even more grow bed. Even more grow bed means my fish will be spending some of their day walking around on dry land.

Fish hate dry land.

One possible solution to this is to add some extra grow beds down at the sump level. My aquaponics space is on a flattened area of sloping ground, so its easy for me to add grow beds down the hill a bit at the sump level. This means the grow beds can act as extra sump capacity rather than being a drain on sump capacity.

When I add my marron farm, I intend to add some blue barrels as large planter pots for a few fruit trees. I'd love to grow a lime, and some blueberries, and perhaps raspberries or grapes.

My description is lacking, but luckily I spent all morning making an animation to demonstrate what I mean.

• The pump is on a timer and runs for 10-15 minutes per hour.
• Water is pumped from the sump up to the fish tank.
• We make the water exit the fish tank from the centre at the bottom because with the pump creating a bit of a whirl pool, that's where all the solid fish waste will gather.
• The water and solids from the fish tank enter the swirl filter. 
• The swirl filter has an inlet port half way up and and outlet at the top so the solids sink to the bottom and are left behind. In the event of some kind of "over nutrient emergency", I'll be able to remove the days solids to lessen the load on the system. If all is going well, the solids in the swirls filter will be chewed up by a few cups of shell grit until they are small enough, and light enough to float out into the growbed. This should help distribute the solids, allowing them to easily flow to all areas of the growbed.
• As soon as the growbed starts to fill, it also starts to empty via hole in the base of the standpipe, but the inflow rate is higher than the outflow rate so the growbed's water level rises.
• Once filled, the open top of the standpipe allows water to flow free back to the lower level to prevent overflow.
• The pump runs for a while longer. The length of time the pump runs for is determined be the need to turnover approximately one fishtank of water each hour. This helps oxygenate the water, and allows the bacteria to get a look at the ammonia, and nitrites.
• The pump shuts off.
• The grow bed continues to drain over the next 40 minutes or so.
• When the grow bed is full, the planters are drained. When the planters are full, the growbed is drained. This way we introduce extra growbeds into the system without needing a larger sump.
• Water flows freely between the planters, and the sump. 
• When evaporation or plant use drops the water below the trigger level of the float valve, water is added from my concrete rainwater tank. My concrete tank water has no chlorine so it can be added directly. It also has a similar pH to my aquaponics system. If you use mains water, you need to have your water sit for a couple of days in the sun to turn the chlorine into something less harmful to fish. [see comments]
• The cycle repeats.

Animation - Bell siphon

I've decided to learn how to make animations so as to be better at communication.... And stuff.

Earlier attempts I have made were created frame by frame, but I recently nabbed a copy of Synfig Studio.

From what I've seen so far, It looks the goods. Its free to download and use and its all open source. Yet again the open source community has exceeded my expectations. All these people who contribute are truly amazing. Thank you all.

Here is my first attempt that actually worked. Depending on what I can offer, I might make animation or visual communication a "thing" because I'm sure I'll need the skills more and more, no matter what I do in the future.

The bell siphon is running with a continuous inflow of water. The siphon triggers when the standpipe fills with water. The grow bed (terracotta colour) floods and drains automatically, creating tide-like conditions for plants. The bell siphon is commonly used in aquaponics as a method to flood and drain grow beds. The water drains back into a fish tank, where a pump cycles it back to the grow bed.

A bell siphon (in yellow) triggering and draining via the standpipe (in green)

The real things looks like this from an earlier post called "Aquaponics - Glass bell siphon"



I just re-read this post and it doesn't sound like me.
But it is.
There, that's settled that.