Aquaponics - Growing sweet potato in water

The good thing about growing things like potatoes in aquaponics is they grow like crazy.

The problem with growing things like potatoes in aquaponics is they like to make babies in your plumbing, and block the water flow.

Following the seemingly happy tomato in a bucket I seem to have created, I figured I give something else a try along the same lines.

I thought I'd suspend a sweet potato over the fish tank and see what happened.

It looks like this...

If you look carefully, you can just make out the roots entering the water diagonally back from the section of sweet potato, and meeting the water just at the waterline of the IBC.

And that's obviously a leaf starting to grow at least it has a chance.





If it grows properly I'll rig a better hanging system for it, but I'm not even sure what time of year they should be planted, so there is a fair chance this wont work. At least the first time.

I tested the fish to see if they would attack the roots and/or  potatoes, and other than for the first few hours, they seemed content to share their world with the plants.

I originally added a sweet potato that had gone crazy with roots, and I suspect the fish simply thought they were worms, but soon gave up when they ended up tasting funny, not behaving sufficiently worm-like, or whatever else fish decide are important traits of their food.

If it works, the lid will be closed to keep the light out, and the plant will be encouraged to grow through a hole in the lid or something. I'll work it out. The result will be some interesting cover for the fish, extra surface area for the nitrifying bacteria to live on, and very visible sweet potatoes that I can watch grow. I should also be able to keep them from getting into the plumbing just because I'll be able to cut them back if it looks like they are getting too close.

One additional advantage will be that I will be able to harvest them one at a time without pulling the plant and disturbing all the small ones before they are ready to be harvested.

But it's early days.



120 Things in 20 years - Aquaponics - Growing sweet potato in water - Maybe.

Aquaponics - Constant supply

Diseases are getting clever.

Mine makes me throw up my medicine, rendering the windows and the medication  becomes ineffective*.

I don't really have a big enough area of grow bed to be very disciplined about maintaining a constant supply of things like lettuce. To do so really requires leaving a bit of space for the seeds I should be adding next week, but I find myself wondering how carrots might do in my system, and use all the reserved real estate to find out.

It's not always carrots. I don't suffer from whatever habitually planting carrots in any free garden space might be called, although I'm guessing someone does, and I'm guessing it is a condition.

The Internet, after all, is a very big place.

But, if I ever found some self discipline, or more grow bed real estate, I'd more thoroughly deploy my system for making sure you plant stuff when you should.

And its this...

If you get little jars with each kind of seed you grow on an ongoing basis, you can label the jars with the days of the month you plant on to ensure a constant supply. In my case, Cos lettuce needs to be planted every 5 days, so my jar would be labelled 1 - 5 - 10 - 15 - 20 - 25. And my baby spinach, 1 - 10 - 20, chives  1 - 15 for every two weeks, and basil has a 1 for once a month.

The result, is all you need to know is the date, and you know what to plant. If you had enough jars that keeping track of such things became necessary, you could also add how many seeds to plant.

Remembering to plant stuff was never really the problem. The main problem was remembering when I planted stuff last. This way you just look at the date and know.

Unless you are lazy.



120 Things in 20 years has taught me that in spite of my seed management system enabling my ongoing dedication to laziness, I still have to remember what season it is and pull out the suitable jars from long term storage. Who would have thought knowing what season it was might be useful.


*I think I just found a linguistic need for a quantum word requiring that rather than being fixed, it's location and or existence is dependant on the observer.