Aquaponics - Recycled Leeks

It turns out it's possible to recycle leeks.

Which is nice.

When you buy or harvest a leek, cut the base off like you might normally do, but perhaps be a little more generous in what you leave. ie cut the bottom off so that it's 1cm thick or so.

Also leave the roots on if they are there still.

Then just stick it into your growbed media and wait patiently for a bit.

If you bought your Leek from a supermarket and the roots are all removed, it takes quite a while before you see new growth. Like all things without roots, they try to grow enough of a root system to keep from getting all thirsty and dead as a priority, then start to put up the all the photosynthesising bits to get on with the business of growing in earnest.

But, if you leave the roots on when you harvest, or better yet, just cut the stem off and leave the roots in the media, you should see new stem growth right from the start.

Pictured here are three store bought Leek bases in different stages of growth.

All of these had no roots at all.

The one I pulled up was just harassed in order to have it's photo taken, but will no doubt be fine because the expanded clay media is very forgiving when doing such things as pulling up a plant just to take a photo of it's roots.

As far as I can tell it's growing normally, and should be a perfectly good Leek in no time.

There's always the chance that something strange might happen and it might turn to a piece of wood or something, but if it does, rest assured I'll probably get around to telling you before you waste too much of your own time doing this.



120ThingsIn20Years thinks it will probably work just fine.

Aquaponics - New growbed flow control

I few days ago I created and installed all the required bits to control the way water enters and exits my growbed.

All this is probably overkill as a lot of people get away with just dumping water at one end, and draining from the other, but there's a fair chance that at some stage down the track I might try to make this system ultra low energy, so I thought I'd design it so the water can move very freely through the browbed, and so it doesn't leave any areas that don't get enough flow. If I go low energy, that might mean low flow, so I designed it to what I think is the best way I could.

The plan is to have the water enter into a submerged pipe at one end of the bed that has a lot of holes in it, and exit via a similar, submerged pipe at the other end. This way the water will enter and exit evenly throughout the width of the growbed ensuring that no corners are left to go stagnant. With high flow, this wouldn't normally be a concern, but I wanted to make sure I had lots of options for the future.

After a bit of experimentation I discovered the quickest and easiest way to make holes in PVC pipe for water flow was with an angle grinder.

Just a normal metal cutting blade does a pretty clean job of cutting a lot of slots in a 90mm PVC pipe.

Just tap it onto the PVC quickly and it works a treat. A one second cut is perfect. Three seconds will burn it.






Slots are a must when using the clay balls for media as if you drilled holes, the balls would block them all.

All sized balls will block all sized holes regardless.

Go with slots.

The end result looks like this and only takes around 5 minutes per meter at most.

I cleaned it up with a little sand paper and added end caps and an elbow.

I cut a hole with a hole saw so that I could add a stand pipe that would go through the elbow, then continue on through the growbed.

There's no great need to make these joins exact because you want water to seep in all through this bit of kit.

I  found some fittings that for some reason have a tapered thread.

When I got them home, I found that the things they screw into don't, which is kind of strange.








The original idea was to cut a hole through the growbed, and screw the two pieces together from either side to lock the fittings on tight.

Because of the taper, I ended up just making the hole in the growbed really tight, and screwing the fitting in really hard so it cut it's own thread into the growbed.

It seems solid enough.

This is what the finished drain looks like. This will drain water from the growbed back to the sump.

A pipe will be fit into the recess at the bottom, so that even though the water enters the drain from the bottom of the growbed, the water will exit the device at a bit lower than the top of the growbed.

I cut a hole with my hole saw into the bottom of the growbed.

This is an oddly scary thing to do.

Shiny new water tight containers don't lend themselves to be holed without causing some distress to the new owner.

I cut the hole slightly smaller than it needed to be, and then hand filed the rest so I could be sure of a very tight fit for the threaded component.

Once coaxed through the hole in the growbed, the standpipe was cut to size, and pressed into place without any glue.

There's no need to glue it because if it leaks, water wont actually leave the system, and there might come a day when I want to adjust the level, or change the system from constant flood to an auto siphon or something.

The drain assembly looked like this when fitted.

The standpipe runs through the growbed on the left hand side.

The other end was completed in a similar manner, but this time with a central inlet because there was already a hole in that position.

This is where water will enter the system from the fishtank.

And that's it.

The growbed part of the system is complete.

It's worth adding plastic caps top the top of the inlet and outlet media guards to keep the clay balls from getting in when your digging around in the garden.





Like I said, it's probably overkill to make the inlet and outlet pipes like I did here, but it should make it just that little bit more efficient.


120 Things In 20 Years isn't above pretending to make a new growbed when really I made it more than a week ago.

Aquaponics - New growbed

I have a shiny new allotment of auqaponics real estate!

Yay me!

With a huge amount of help from Mrs. 120 Things, we added two submerged sections of 90mm PVC as inlet and outlet drainage media screens.

We also cut holes in the top of one end of the BYAP grow bend to allow water in from the fishtank, and the bottom of the other end to allow a standpipe to be fitted.

Then we fitted the standpipe. Basically a short length of pipe that sets the depth the water will sit at, by draining the growbed from the top of the pipe, out through a hole in the growbed.

Or in normalspeak, a plug with a tube stuck in it.

The result of a lot of picking through the media (clay balls) to remove all the rubbish that comes with buying second hand media, was this very nice looking growbed. (the growbed was second hand as well)

Working with a purpose built growbed with purpose built media is soooo much nicer than working with home made stuff. I'm all for tinkering and DIY, but if you just want a garden, this pre-made stuff is great. I have no connection with Backyard Aquaponics other than existing on their forum* (as BullwinkleII), but having bought one of their growbeds (second hand), I feel very comfortable recommending them.

Getting there.


* and winning my pump and some other stuff in one of their photo competitions.

Aquaponics - Rain rain it's ok

I was planing a bit of a build post on setting up my new improved aquaponics system, but the heat wave we have been having of up to 44 C (111 F) was interrupted this weekend by two days of rain that sunk our fringe festival.

But I like rain.

For one thing it's nice that 44 C, but it also lets my put off doing things that I really should.

44 C days also let me put stuff off, but they are less pleasant to sit in.

Rain is much better.

So my new system looks like this...

I'm in the process of siphoning it out, but it collected enough water to fill it to the 3/4 mark.

But I think I've finalised a plan for my new system.

I've never been a big fan of removing solids from an auqaponics system because I really like the way it forms an integrated system, where the fish waste feeds the plants, but I thought I'd have a go at it because years ago someone thought it was a good idea.

The only real problem I have with removing solids is that it seems like a waste, but I figure if I can use the solids in the system, it will still fit within my comfort zone.

So the plan is...

• Make a swirl filter to collect solids
• Build a bell siphon into the swirl filter with an adjustable (height) stand pipe
• Set an outlet on the swirl filter such that it can dump water from the surface at the same rate that water is entering from the fishtank. This way the siphone will never trigger under normal operation.
• Make a stock tank float valve so that it adds water from the tap if it gets below a certain level 
• Make a Shishi-odoshi, which is a thing you might find in a Japanese garden that water trickles into, and occasionally goes "Doonk". It's basically a length of bamboo that is mounted at 45 degrees on a pivot point just a bit lower than it's half way mark. Water enters the pipe from the top, and when it gets full, the weight at the top causes it to pivot and dump it's water. The nature of the universe being what it is means the device dumps all it's water, because once it's commited to the dump, the weight of all the water shifts to the (now) bottom end. It also hits the ground and makes the "Doonk" sound that is apparently useful to scare deer away from your garden. Also apparently, Shishi-odoshi (鹿威) means "scare the deer" in Japanese. I dont know why you would want to do that. 
• Make an automatic water topup system for my sump tank so that when the water gets low due to evaporation, it will add a bit. There is such a thing as a stock tank valve that makes sure your cows always have a full trough no matter how thirsty they get. I'll use one of those. They have a float that regulates when water can flow. I'll use that in the sump, set so it triggers at my minimum low tide mark, then rather than dump that water into the sump, I'll dump it into the Shishi-odoshi. When this happens the water will continue to flow from the tap until the sump is filled again, so the Shishi-odoshi will fill reasonably quickly, then dump suddenly. 
• Build a cup of PVC with a half inch hole in it so that it surrounds the standpipe from about halfway up and is higher than the standpipe by a few inches. 
• Drill a half inch hole into the standpipe at the bottom, of a size that would mean the water being sucked into the standpipe would be roughly equalled be the water entering the cup. ie it wouldn't just instantly drain and halt the siphon once triggered. 
• Direct this dump from the Shishi-odoshi into the cup surrounding the siphon, and it will instantly trigger the siphon. 
• The swirl filter will collect the solids at the bottom in the centre, so only a small amount of water needs to be dumped to empty the solids from the system. Perhaps only a litre or two. 
• The dump of solids from the contraption (and this is by far my favourite bit) will drop directly into my soon to be newly constructed worm farm. My fish go crazy for worms. 

The beauty of the system is that the hotter it is, the more active my silver perch are. They eat way more in summer than winter. The result will be in winter when the fish and worms are less active, the worm farm wont need or get much water, and the system wont need as much topup water. 

The result is that it should regulate itself perfectly. 

in summer...

• worms are more active and eat more
• the fish are more active and produce more waste
• The worm farm needs more water (or at least can handle the extra litre or two every day) (mine will be a fairly large worm farm. I'm thinking of using a blue barrel)
• the system needs more topup water to replace evaporation so the Shishi-odoshi will trigger more often, and so supply more water and solids to the more active worms.

The worms eat my kitchen scraps, and fish poop.

The fish eat the worms, some duckweed growing on the sump, the scraps from the system (cuttings, root balls etc) and some store bought feed.

The plants eat the fish solids.

I eat the plants and the fish.

Everyone is happy.

Except the plants and the fish, the duckweed, and the worms. 

120 Things in 20 years Where I am everyone.

Aquaponics - Slow leak drainage system

Rather than running a siphon, because my pump is much bigger than it needs to be, I'm going to try a slow leak system.

I'll set it up so a bell siphon will work in it if I ever add another grow bed, and my pump needs to be on all the time. But right now my pump only needs to run for around 10 minutes per hour to turn over the water, and fill the grow bed.

click to play animation if it's not already playing

A slow leak system has a standpipe with a hole in the bottom. It also has a high inflow that fills the growbed faster than the small hole in the bottom of the standpipe can drain it. This means that the growbed would overflow if not for the standpipe. The standpipe allows excess water to overflow back into the sump tank, or fish tank. The height of the standpipe sets the maximum depth of the water.

The timer is simply any digital timer with a power point. You plug in your pump, plug the timer into household power outlet, and set when, and how often you want the timer to trigger the pump.

The aims are twofold.

1. To turn over 100% of your fish tank's water every hour (for the sake of your fish)
2. to fill the growbed to its maximum height at least once per hour, and have it drain back out again before re-filling (for the sake of your plants, and the nitrifying bacteria)

In my case, I estimate I'll be running the pump for around ten or fifteen minutes per hour, but that might require some adjustment after taking some water tests. It's difficult to estimate how much water my pump will actually shift in ten minutes, because I'm not exactly sure how high it will end up having to pump. The higher it's pumping, the less water per minute it will pump.

If this turns out to not work as well as I thought it might, I can always revert to a bell siphon, by simply replacing the standpipe with one that doesn't have a hole in it, and adding a bell.