Aquaponics - Pump-less cycling Success!

Sometimes, I know things like cycling a pile of gravel should work, but I'm still surprised when they actually do.

After shovelling 3/4 of the gravel into my grow bed, I got lazy and went to bed. But I thought I'd try getting a head start to cycling up my system as gravel in a grow bed, and a pile of gravel on the ground. 

It was about to rain, so I figured it was a good time to add some fish emulsion to the gravel. When I last wrote about pump-less cycling, I promised I'd let you know if it worked.

It worked!

My recent test showed some nitrites.

The sample pictured was taken from rain runoff, at the standpipe in my new growbed.

To make sure I wasn't getting the nitrites from the bottle of fish emulsion, I tested some fresh water with fish emulsion added. 

ammonia 2.0

nitrite 0.0

nitrate 0.0

What this means is, there were no nitrites introduced directly from the bottle of fish emulsion. What that means is that my pump-less, sump-less, no fishtanked system is cycling, because the nitrites must have come from the bacteria in my new system.

No great surprise really, but still interesting.

It's actually not that important for me to cycle my system, because I will be adding 100 litres of mature media from my test system. That 100 litres of media is currently coping with my eleven silver perch, so in the new system, it should continue to cope. As long as I transfer it in such a way as to keep it wet at all times, my nitrifying bacteria colony should find its new home welcoming. I'm told I should bury my old mature media from the small test system at about half way down into the new gravel media for best results.

Aquaponics - Gravel

Gravel.
Heavy.
Late.

I got some 20mm blue metal road gravel, as growing media for my new, larger aquaponics grow bed.

It looks like this.

And unfortunately it needs washing.

Also unfortunately, there is three tons of the stuff.








Actually it's not necessary to be too fussy when washing gravel as the system takes care of a lot of it, but this seems like very dirty gravel so it needs a good rinse at the very least. It's one of those things that takes so much work to redo if you don't do it right the first time, that its worth putting in the effort the first time.

I was hoping the truck might be able to deliver the gravel directly into the grow bed, where I could then rinse it with a high pressure hose. Unfortunately the grow bed was a bit too high for that, so it had to be unloaded in a pile next to it.

Its actually a good thing it wasn't able to be be dumped directly into the grow bed, because it had much more dust on it than I had anticipated.









Washing gravel is hard work with all but one method. Some bright person came up with the idea of just washing it with a fire hose when its in your trailer, or truck. By all accounts this seems to work well, so if you have that option, it's probably worth trying.

Its been a few years since I shovelled 10 ton of stuff from one spot to another, and in those few years, stuff has got a whole lot heavier.  Even when it only weighs 3 ton.

Unfortunately it didn't quite all get done.












Thirsty.

Aquaponics - Beasties

I found some alien beasties in my new grow bed.

It's not often that you get to mark out three square metres or so of clean wet stuff on a high contrast background, and see what moves in overnight. In the morning, there were some bug deaths, some bugs just getting on with their lives, and my first bug births. I have no idea what they are, but they only took 12 hours to move into my new grow bed. 

Very very small beasties

I put a few hundred litres of water into the grow bed to test my silicone, and to weigh it down.

I'm hoping the truck that delivers my gravel will be able to dump it directly into the grow bed saving me a stack of time. It wont be able to, but it keeps me from thinking about having to shovel gravel.

It's no wonder people buy bulldozers.