Aquaponics - Settled media

As I mentioned in this post on moss growing on my media, my grow beds seemed to have settled since the move, and are perhaps getting too wet at the surface as a result.

I think it's officially causing problems.

At one stage my media was up near the rim of my blue barrel, but now it sits here.

That's around 100-120mm down from the top, so I can easily fit another bag of scoria on top. This would increase my filtration a bit as well as keeping the surface a bit dryer.

My media is still getting wet on the surface in spite of my trimming the stand pipe by around 15mm. I trimmed it a few weeks ago, but either it wasn't enough, or perhaps the moisture is coming down in the form of grow house rain, rather than up from the bottom, via the pump.

The media that is wet, is the stuff that tends to sit a bit lower than the surrounding media, but it could still be from "rain", and is simply not drying as quickly as the higher sections. I'm only talking about 10mm between the high and low sections.

One down side is that just as my first strawberry was starting to ripen...

It also started to rot where it was touching the damp scoria.

I really wanted to eat that strawberry.