Aquaponics - Recommissioned strawberry towers

It occurs to me as I recommission my strawberry towers, that an aquaponics system is a lot less painful to stop and start than ...say... a nuclear reactor.

I'm not sure why that occurs to me, but it does.

After one of my recent floods due to poor craftsmanship, my strawberries and the plants in my NFT tubes went thirsty for a bit, and as a result, got all crunchy. I managed to save only a few plants, but even their small number was too much for my grow bed.

My grow bed now looks like this (I did some pruning of the tomato as well.

I pulled them all out and relocated them into the strawberry towers, and took yet another risk with running the towers again.

All these half dead hangers on were taking up too much space in the bed's and were crowding out the capsicums. The capsicum plants are now all fruiting, and my first is about to turn red.

I quite like green capsicum, and will probably harvest sooner than this first time, but I want a red one for a photo.

The rear two towers aren't flowing at all, but that's fine by me, because that's two less to worry about.



I think I'm going to buy another $30 blue barrel, cut it in half and, added with my two existing halves, make a four grow bed system. This will also allow me to mount the strawberry towers in such a way as to leak into the grow beds rather than onto the grown. This should solve a lot of sleeplessness.

The fish will be relocated into one of the IBC's I have kicking around, and will be joined by a stack of new friends.

By buying some new fry, I'll force myself to build a bigger system like I should have right away. I'm still working on finding a more portable lightweight media so I dont get stuck in the same position I was in last time when I was forced to move just before all those tons of gravel came on line.



Here at 120 Things in 20 years, when thinking about aquaponics and recommissioned strawberry towers, one of my few regrets is not having built a proper sized system we could feed ourselves from sooner.