Aquaponics - Stake 'n beans

I cant really see why a plant like a bean needs all the space the seed packet tells me it needs.

I figure instead of giving them some kind of string or stake to climb on, I'll just give them more beans to climb on.

With this in mind, I planted fifteen bean seeds in a single plastic NFT cup a few days ago.

Fourteen have sprung to life, and are looking good. It's still early days yet, but I suspect, with a plant like a bean, they will each find enough real estate to express their beanie selves, and will probably do alright.

That's them on the left, and right now they don't look like much, but it's either going to turn into a jungle, or some kind of rotten swamp in no time.

If it works, I doubt I'll get a harvest fourteen times as much as I would have with one plant, but I should do better than the single.

At the very least, it should be interesting.

I planted one or two in each cup in the previous batch, and unfortunately didn't count how many beans we harvested. This time didn't plant any cups with just a single bean to compare outputs with my fourteen bean cup, but that's my plan for tomorrow.

I think I'll do a test with different cups with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and if I have enough seeds left, I'll do one with 32 bean plants all growing in the same standard, small, plastic cup. I'll measure the output from each cup, and decide which is the beast way to go.




120 Things in 20 years, bringing you free, NFT, bean science, even if you don't want it.

Aquaponics - Strawberry towers and NFT tubes.

Success! Mrs 120ThingsIn20Years and I finished renovating the growhouse.

It looks like this.

Sorry for the poor quality photo. It got dark whilst I was having a rest that turned into a sleep.

Rests can do that.

The new NFT tubes addition looks like this, and is mainly comprised of half a dozen holes with beans at the back so I can climb them up the wall, half a dozen holes with coz lettuce in the centre, and half a dozen of baby spinach. There are a few other things sprinkled in between, and where ever they would fit.

The strawberry plants have all been transplanted.

Those that were in my original little test system should have transplanted without stress because they were already in my modular transplanting pots, but it took me so long to finish the redesign that they spent a little time walking around on dry land.

Not happy plants.

The ones I ripped from the main grow bed and transplanted with bare roots, seem to be just fine.

The original system is a wreck. I did a lot of damage moving it around and getting in behind it to tie down the growhouse structure to a fence.

The end result is a bit sad looking, but it will bounce back.

Along the right side, I planted peas that will climb the wall next to strawberry towers, (to right of frame) and the cascading plant at the front left is the oregano I rediscovered in the centre of the overgrown bit under the tomato. Actually there are two tomato plants in that lump, and I damaged the third too close to the roots to save it, so it's now worm food.

Someone from a university is coming to peek at the system tomorrow. I hope he didn't want it to look pretty. Oops. He's looking at lots of local systems, so no doubt he will be used to seeing systems in a state of constant rebuild.

The plants in the back left corner are some flat leaf parsley, and the base of a store bought bunch of celery that I thought I'd plant. It had no roots and no leaves, but It's doing quite well.

Aquaponics can do that.


Not just Aquaponics - Strawberry towers and NFT tubes - http://120thingsin20years.blogspot.com/


.

Aquaponics - Strawberry towers MK 237 part 2

I'm getting there.

It's taking forever, but I'm getting there.

Stage two sees me with a stack of finished end caps with their various pipe work siliconed into place.

The ones with the two pipes are to be the horizontal NFT pipes.

I built an overflow pipe into my first NFT test pipe, and it's saved the day a few times.

I arranged the normal flow so it exits under water so I cant hear it, and the overflow so it splashes as a warning that the tube is blocked,

Never use a ruler when you can use a laser, and a ruler. My mum gave me this laser straight line tool, and It's a pretty handy thing to have. If your mum hasn't given you one of these, you can place your pipe next to a door frame or something else you think might be straight, and draw a line down the length of your pipe by holding your pen flat against the frame.

If your hole cutter is anything like my new one, (my old $7 hole cutting set dissolved in a spectacular "it's a good thing I always wear safety glasses" kind of way), it will be impossible to remove the circle of PVC that will be left behind in the cutter. But I have a tip...

A hole cutter has a small drill in the centre, and then a large round bit with a saw edge. Drill through until you have the beginnings of a circle cut into your PVC, then withdraw the cutter a bit and waggle your drill around so that the guide hole is enlarged. You no longer need the guide hole because you now have the larger circle, so it wont matter. It's the guide hole that the circle offcut of plastic seems to get stuck on. After discovering this they all fell out without any help.

Lastly I drilled some holes in my gutter to take the tubes exiting the bottom of my strawberry towers.

My finished, but as yet un-siliconed tower components look like this.

Getting there.

I cut 5 holes in each 900mm long tube. The top hole is 100mm from the top to allow a litle space between the plant and the grow house roof, and the bottom hole is 150mm up from the bottom to keep the roots out of the drain holes.

I'm not sure how the drain bit is going to go, because I have no idea how long the roots are going to be.

.

Aquaponics - Self cleaning swirl filter Mk 2 part 2

The new version of the self cleaning swirl filter actually works.

The water enter via the green garden hose almost at the bottom, sets up a whirl pool, and exits via four points

The first exit is a small hole in the standpipe (not shown in the video) The second is the black plastic leaf skimmer that we see taking out some floating duckweed, the third is the bell siphon (big white thing in the centre). All those three water exits go back to the grow beds and take solids with them.

The other exit is to the NFT tubes and is the clear plastic tube that we see first up. A few things look like they nearly get sucked ito it, but it actually does a pretty good job of only taking clear water. This tube is set just below the low tide that the siphon creates.

As far as I know this is an original idea, but I've been wrong before. Rather than my usual disclaimer, this time I offer nothing but this.

Aquaponics - Self cleaning swirl filter Mk 2

I think I have a better idea for a self cleaning swirl filter.

Water enters a bucket part way up from the bottom. My picture show half way up, but I think it would be better where the "*" is around a third of the way up. The water enters via an elbow to set up a whirl pool.

Solids gravitate towards the centre, and sink to the bottom.

The first dump back to the grow beds is a hole in the stand pipe down the bottom, that creates a constant, gentle, downwards flow to further encourage solids to drop out of suspension.

The second dump device, is a bell siphon that periodically dumps water, creating a powerful suction, cleaning the filter of collected solids and returning them to the grow bed. This siphon is shortened by a breather pipe that means it only changes the height of water from between the "high tide" and the "low tide" marks rather than dumping all the water. If all the water is dumped, you loose the gentle entry of the water, and the swirl is broken down each time the device is empty.

A third dump intermittently exists at the top of the filter to act as a leaf skimmer. This would only flow at the top of each fill cycle, and would just be a trickle for a few seconds as the container is at its fullest, and would dump any floating particulates back to the grow bed.

Finally, water exits from the filter from a point just under the low tide mark. This would be the water that flows through the NFT tubes as it would be almost free of heavy solids, and would also not collect any floating solids.

Floating solids are sometimes sucked into the pump when fish disrupt them from the surface, when they get caught into a whirl pool and sucked down into the pump, or when the grow bed empties onto them, pushing them under water. Duckweed is at a very fine balance between floating and sinking when it's getting old, and can stay under water for a minute or so before slowly rising back to the surface. A fish swimming by can easily pull some under water where it might find it's way to the filter. It doesn't happen often, but I find 3 or four leaves a day go through the pump if I put a sieve under the grow bed outlet to check what the pump is lifting up.

There you have it, a self cleaning swirl filter.

Perhaps.

I'll make one to check.

Aquaponics - Swirl filter variation

I had an idea, but now I'm not sure it was mine after all. But here it is anyway.

I need to get solids out of the water for the NFT, but I don't want to remove the solids from the entire system. It's the solids that make everything work.

I thought I'd give this a try.

I took a peanut butter bucket. (We eat a lot of peanut butter)

And drilled a hole in it in the bottom.

Then drilled another hole near the lip.

I added a 12mm poly pipe length as a standpipe.

I also added an exit pipe (clear plastic top right), and an input pipe from the pump (19mm black poly pipe with an elbow)

The plan is to add water so that it swirls around.

The water on the inside moves slowly and the solids settle in the middle.






Actually I think there is something else going on here, but I'm not sure what it is.

If you put a helium balloon in a car, and put on the brakes, instead of the balloon moving forward like everything else, it rushes to the back of the car. The opposite also applies to acceleration and cornering. As far as I can tell, this happens because, under brakes, the pressure moves to the front. High pressure is like the pressure at ground level, and helium balloons hate being at ground level, so try to escape in the only direction they know how.

Up.

But it's not really up, its from high pressure to low pressure. Or in the case of the car, from the front (where all the air in the car is glugging toward) to the back.

Ask a kid with a balloon to try it.

I think something to do with something like that may, or may not, be happening here.

I'll try to find out.

I put the bell from the grow bed's bell siphon over my stand pipe, and the end result looks like this.

I have both tubes dumping back to the grow bed because this is just a test, but normally only one would go back. The other (top left of the bucket) would be feeding the NFT tubes that you can see under the device in the background.

I'll take some video and post it up tomorrow, and hopefully capture the thing working.

I'm not sure that it will work all that well, because I think it's too small. I think it needs to be wider, to allow the centre to be very slow moving, and deeper, to allow more time for the particles to settle out.

Aquaponics - modular potting III

I thought I might take this modular garden design just one step further.

If I cut holes in 90mm PVC piping so that at one end they are close together, and then progressively get further apart, it should allow me to grow twice as much stuff in one length of PVC, because the gaps between the holes, only need to be the size of the different sized lettuce as they grow up.

If I plant say 2 lettuce seeds in a pot every few days, I should be able to move the tubes along as they need more space, and as I need to plant another pair of lettuce for continuous supply.

So to start with I plant a lettuce in the space on the left. I wait a few days, move the first pot to the right, put a new empty pot in the first slot, and plant some seeds in it.

If I keep doing this every few days, or once a week, I get a continuous supply of lettuce. Or whatever else.

Anything that grows for a long time, like say chilli plants, I'll put into the main grow bed, but all the smaller fast growing things, I should be able to at least double the number of plants I can keep. And all without having to transplant.

I'm guessing it might take 20 seconds to move 10 lettuce along each week.

I think I've become obsessed with seeing how productive I can make my 5 cubic metres of grow house.

Aquaponics - Modular potting II

I thought I'd formalize the idea of movable modular plants by changing a small section of my grow bed to test the idea.

I started with an icecream container and drilled some holes in it to allow nutrient rich water to circulate freely.

I partialy burried it in the media where my core sampler used to be.

The depth I burried it is set so that the pots would see around 10-15mm of water at their ankles.

I used the same black plastic pots that I used in the NFT test tube, so I can move them to a new home when they need more space.

Nine seedling fit in the test modular garden.

If all goes according to plan, I should be able to move these at will into the NFT tubes that I plan on making. It will be a bit like transplanting, but without all the transplanting.

I'm not sure how well it will work, or if it will work at all. Sometimes unforeseen things happen when I do stuff without research.




One potential problem I can see is the possibility of the roots just ignoring my boundaries and doing whatever they please.

I think that's what I would do if I were a plant.

But I'm not so I have no idea.

Aquaponics - Modular potting

When plants are small they don't take up much room.

I'm confident we all new that.

But one of the problems with having only a small grow house, is that space is at a premium. If I plant a seedling with enough room around it to grow into whatever it's going to grow into, I'm left with a stack of empty space for the next month or two.

One solution to this is to plant all kinds of fast growing little things between the big things and harvesting them as the big thing needs the space.

My solution is to make it so I can move all my plants around at will.

No doubt this has been done before, but rather than research and find out if there is anything wrong with doing this, I'm just going to jump right in. The fact that I don't know of anyone doing it, may well mean it simply doesn't work.

I'm not going to let that stop me from trying it anyway.

Before I made my NFT test tube, I had already bought some strawberry seedlings that were growing out of their punnet. I needed to transplant them, but didn't have the NFT tube built. My solution was to transplant them into their pots, and then just bury the pots in the main grow bed. This meant that they wouldn't have to go through any more transplant stress than they needed to, and could settle into their homes that would be theirs for the next few years.

You can see the buried pots at the top of this photo of worms being added to my grow bed.

I didn't have enough real estate in the grow bed to plant them out, and this way I could crowd them in while they were small, and then move them to the NFT tube when I got around to building it, without really transplanting them.

I think I'm going to try to use this concept throughout my system.

Aquaponics - Blocked NFT test tube

My test tube is getting blocked.

Its only a week ago that I rebuilt my NFT test with larger plumbing to prevent blockage of the water supply.

But now it seems rather than clogging the pipe, the solids are getting through my NFT tube and getting caught up in the plants root systems.

There was a bit of a change in the sound the system made as the water entered the grow bed. It went from a babbling brook, to a brook with a throat infection.

It turned out that the culprit was a build up of solids.

This pic is looking down the NFT pipe with all the plants removed.

The water was still running, but was flowing in surges rather than constantly so I get the feeling it would have blocked soon.

Quite a bit of solid fish waste for a week and only ten fish.

And no doubt much of it got through to the grow bed, so this is only a sample.









Looking back through my posts, it seems that this aquaponics business is a lot of problem solving.

It really isn't.

I'm quite happy to make mistakes and show the world, but if you keep your system simple, there is really no need to tinker with it. Before moving to this house, I ran the blue barrel system without doing much at all.

Until the goat ate everything.

But now I want to try different methods and collect solar heat, and all kinds of other things. So it's bound to look more complicated than it is.

Aquaponics has become a bit of a platform for a few other things. For instance, I'm attempting to collect solar hot water. I'd like to get back into the wind energy thing, and connect up a wind turbine or two to the system and take it off grid. And I'd like to learn some electronics to apply to the grow house, and to everything else I do in the future. Electronics seems like some powerful stuff, and I'm pretty sure it will be interesting to learn a bit about.

Currently I know enough to make a torch.  

I figure I need to know enough to make a remote control lawnmower. I'm not really sure if that's the amount I need to know, because I don't know enough about electronics. But that seems about right.

Aquaponics - NFT test system rebuild

I mentioned I did a rebuild of my NFT test before leaving my system unattended, and as far as my attention goes, in the fore for four days.

Yeah I just wanted to say "fore for four" in a sentence.

It wasn't as fulfilling as you might think.

But this is what I did....

This is what I used to have.

Or at least this is the exit tube I used to have.

The inlet tube was even smaller, at 4mm.

It was getting itself blocked on most days.

This is what I have now.

Now I add the entire flow of my pump through the NFT test. I guess it's not really NFT now because its no longer a film of water, but rather a tube half full of water.

I went with 12mm poly because I have a lot of it, and a lot of fittings lying around.

12mm polly is around the same diameter that exits my pump, so anything that can make it through my sad little pump should flow through the rest of the system without blockage.

I drilled a bigger hole

And found some bits that should do the job.

At the time, I was also getting ready to go away for a few days, so didn't really have time to be fussy.

It would have been better to use straight fittings, and curve my pipes rather than have these right angle fittings as they slow the flow a bit, and I'm struggling with getting enough flow as it is.

It turns out, you can often force a thread even when your project is all plastic.

There has been a few times where I found it expedient to employ what I like to call "Force tapping" a thread.

It involves screwing something into a place where there is not yet a thread for said something. Oddly enough, if you unscrew it, you will often see a shiny new thread.

It even works when both parts are plastic.

It also ruins the thread of the thing you are trying to screw in, so be careful how you employ this method.

My next hot tip is to stretch an O-ring from a snap connector garden hose thinggy with some pliers, and gently force it over the thread you want to make a seal with.

Plumbing tape probably would have been better.

Actually, what would have been better, is whatever you would get is you went to the hardware and asked someone for a part that would do exactly what I'm doing. I'm guessing there is one.

But this looks pretty good, and as I strive for second best practice, I consider this as having exceeded my expectations.

I swamped the side the test system was on because I wanted a shorter trip from the pump, and a shorter return trip back to the fish tank.

I also mounted the entire thing onto some milk bottles full of water. This is an attempt to shed some of the heat that the PVC tube picks up on a hot day, and store that heat into the milk bottle heat sinks.

It should work a bit, but I'm not sure I'll need it any more because of the high rate of flow I'll be putting through the tube.

The new depth looks like this.

This is a bit deceiving because the water flows differently when the plants are in place, and it makes the other end dip a little.

The depth is now more like 25mm, where it was 5mm before.

It's very easy to check by lifting a pot out and seeing the water mark.

The new outflow into the grow bed now looks like this.

Due to the length of the tube, it now enters the grow bed from the far corner. This means it no longer dumps into the core tester.

There were no worms in the core sample I took last, and I'm wondering if having the water dump somewhere else might change that.

Today when I pulled up a lettuce, there was a worm within the root system, so they are in there.


[edit from the future - This turned out to leak a bit ]

Solar hot water - Aquaponics - NFT worm

[Edit from the future - there is some additional material on NFT ]

That previous post was meant to go out 2 days ago, but I saved it as a draft instead of publishing it.

That sums up my life at the moment.

I'm in draft mode. I found one of my fish dead, on the concrete yeaterday. I'll post about it when I know a bit more about it.

But I did take the time to check the water level in my NFT test, and discovered that not only was the water very hot, but there was a worm in it.

My worm looks like he's all broken and sore, but when I gently teased him out, it tuns out he was faking.

Perhaps he's in labour.

I've always thought that those large, white, thicker sections on a worm indicated the presence of an egg. (seen here on the left in pink)

One of the dangers in always thinking something, is that it might not be true. With anything you have known all your life, there is a fair chance your older brother was the source of the information at the worm wise age of five and a half.

I'll look into it, and if it turns out it's important, I'll let you know.

But the reason this post is in solar hot water, is than on a 17c day, I'm finding my water in the NFT tube, within the grow house, is 36c. I'm pretty sure worms don't like 36c so I moved him back into the main system. There is also the danger that something like a worm could block the plumbing and cause an overflow.

I'm guessing that's a little hot for strawberry plants as well, although they seem content enough.

That's not bad from a heat collecting position though, even if it isn't so good for a strawberry or worms position.

The strange thing is, I'm collecting all this heat from a white PVC tube, that I thought would be one of the cooler sections of my grow house. It's making me rethink the way I might go about collecting some heat to make a solar hot water heater.

The other strange thing is that the air temperature in the hothouse is 29c.

I think I might have a hot house within a hothouse situation going here.

If so it might be very easy to concentrate some pretty hight temperatures, making storage of the heat a lot more compact.

NFT test

[Edit from the future - there is some additional material on NFT ]

As usual, this is one of those things that I just made in the hope that research wasn't necessary until I had failed at least once. I really don't know things like how much nutrient rich water to flow through, exactly how deep the water should be, and, well, everything else. What I do know is that you cut some holes in PVC pipes, stick plants into the holes, and pump water through the pipes.

So I started with what I know.

I cut some holes in some pipe. This will be for seed raising so I'll cut the holes close together.

I'm hoping to be able to move plants around at will to maximise the growing space I have.

If I can move plants, I can grow them densely when they are little, move them to the medium density area when required, and then to the largest spaced holes for a while before harvest.

The plan is for small plastic pots to sit so that they touch the bottom.

And a trickle of nutrient rich water will pass through the base of each plastic pot.

Because I'm still using my sad old pump, I'm a bit limited as to how much flow I can offer the NFT pipe, so I'm stating with a only a broken stream from a 4mm (external) pipe. Basically at the rate of a dripping tap.

Next I added a 90 degree bend, and a short extension with an end cap. This should allow me to adjust the depth by slightly rolling the entire pipe and bend, so that the outlet pipe sets the desired water level.

I was going to make it so that the end cap could be rotated and thus the exit pipe's height adjusted, but it was a better option to seal everything properly (I used plumbing tape for this because I might want to pull it all apart if it doesn't work), and just rotate the entire unit to adjust water depth.


Here's a hot tip I discovered.

Its possible to make a really good seal with clear plastic hose, by drilling a hole that is a bit too small to pass the pipe through.

Cut a slice off an end to make it taper to a point.














Pass it through the hole.

Then grip it with pliers and pull like mad.

With a bit of effort (the more effort required, the better the seal) you can get a very good seal.

Simply pull it all the way through until there is the desired amount of tail on the end inside.

This will be the drain hole, and emergency overflow in case of blockage.




Having said that, clear plastic tube isn't very good for aquaponics, it gets a build up of algae on the inside, and will eventually block. This is just a test, so I want everything to be removable, and I also want to be able to see water draining, but in the final version, I will use black poly pipe.

So my final product looks like this.

Water enters through the 4mm pipe to the end on the left out of frame, and runs through until it drains back into the fish tank, through the elbow, and the clear plastic tubes.

If all goes well.

Now I can pull my new strawberry seedlings from the blue barrel, and add them to the NFT pipes without disturbing them.

This top down view shows the thin black pipe that delivers water just jammed into the hole on the side of the pot, but it will eventually have its own entry hole drilled right at the very end of the pipe.

The seedlings are already showing roots peaking through the bottom of the pots, so they should be just right for transplanting into the shallow water.


In the dirt world, you would have to transplant into ever bigger pots, but I'm hoping that in aquaponics, there will be no need, as the pot really just becomes a convenient handle to move the plants around with, and less to do with how much access to nutrient they have.

Who knows. I'll let you know more as I find it out.

[Edit from the future - there is some additional material on NFT ]

Aquaponics - Hot house

A few days ago, I bought a little hothouse.

It's actually surprisingly well made, as far as the frame goes.

I have no idea how long the cover is going to last, but I'm assured it's made of UV stabilised plastic.

If the plastic gives out on me I'll recover it with a thicker, more rigid poly carbonate sheeting.

It works. It's hot in there.

It's my new office.


The shelving will come in handy, as I'm planning to add some NFT channels or something similar, to expand my growing space.

NFT or nutrient film technique usually has 1 or 2 millimetres of nutrient rich water flowing through  pipes with a series of holes cut in the top. Small pots sit in the holes. If you've ever bought a lettuce from a supermarket with roots still on, there is a fair chance it was grown hydroponically, in NFT channels.

I think I might go a little deeper, and have a little more flow to keep everything cool.




I also just discovered these tie down things in my shed that I didn't know I had. They work like luggage tags or those single use handcuffs, and I cant help thinking the way they ratchet will be extremely useful for something down the track.

They're also very useful as tie downs.

[Edit from the future - there is some additional material on NFT ]

Aquaponics - Fat Film Technique

I bought some of these in the hope that they would fit into my thin film technique tubes.

It's actually a seed raising tray, but the pots all come out of the tray so I thought I'd be able to use them.

It would of course involve throwing away the tray, the plastic wrapping, the cardboard advertising on the front and back, and the reciept, but that shouldn't pose a problem for me as I'm a white middle class man from a developed nation, so waste is in my genes.

But it gets worse.

They don't fit.

The pot should be sitting on the bottom of the tube, or really close to it.

I should have measured* twice, bought once.

But like I said I'm from a middle class background, not a ruling* class one.





I'll take them back and try something else.


*Bada-bing!

Aquaponics - Nutrient Film Technique or NFT

One of the best things about setting up an NFT or Nutrient Film Technique aquaponics system, is that I get to use PVC yet again. I dont know why, but I love the stuff.

As far as I can tell, Nutrient Film Technique, involves planting plants into little pots that sit in a channel with a thin layer of nutrient rich water flowing at their roots. The water is only one or two millimetres deep, so most of the roots have plenty of access to the air they also need.

I'm guessing the water migrates at least part way up the roots in that way that water does, but who knows.

Oval cross section NFT PVC tubes

Some time ago I got hold of these two PVC, oval cross section pipes.

They are currently sitting in the rafters of my shed, but I think its time to pull them down and incorporate them into my life in a more meaningful way. Not that I have anything against sitting in rafters if that's what you're into. But for me and my PVC, its all about getting down and being attached to a fence or something.

I have no idea where to get the cups from so I'm not sure If I'll have to make them or if they are an off the shelf kind of prospect.

Either way I'm going to have a go at this NFT caper, and see If it might be a way to get some additional real estate for my strawberries.

The plan, at this stage at least, is to attach them to the fence behind my little aquaponics system.

With a little slope built in it should be possible to pump water up from the fish tank (hose drawn in orangy-brown*), have it flow through the top tube, and empty from the left into the bottom tube(sloping slightly to the right), where it would then flow to the right and empty back into the grow bed or directly back into the fish tank.

Those green things are my stunning illustrations of strawberry plants.

See how they thrive?

Thrive plants thrive.

Plans have a habit of changing around here, but it should work. If it does work, I should be able to move the strawberries around, so that when they put out runners (strawberry plants put out runners (runners are little baby strawberry plants sent out on a stem to set up home next door to the original plant (generally speaking a very sensible way to reproduce compared to all the carrying on everything else does))) I can set up a situation where there are vacant spots on either side to accommodate the runners.

[Edit from the future - there is some additional material on NFT ]


* Yeah! That's a colour!