Aquaponics - Safe fish hides

I've been very lucky since being unlucky.

The first fish deaths I had over the first months after cycling my aquaponics system, turned out to be caused by a plant that seems to be only poisonousness to fish.

Since then, I haven't had any more deaths, but it occurs to me that it might be possible for a fish to die, and I might never notice. Or at least not notice before it began to decompose and foul my water.

The eleven silver perch spend most of their day hiding from imaginary predators in the halved terracotta pot I put in the water for precisely this purpose.

You can never be too safe from imaginary predators.

But if and when I make a bigger system, I think I'll make some fish hides in such a way, so that if a fish dies or is sick, it cant just get all sleepy in the hide on the bottom.


I suspect the easiest way to do this would be to suspend the hide a little way off the bottom, of even high up near the surface. That way if anything dies or is struggling, it will be obvious, on the bottom rather than hidden from view.

As a temporary measure, I've cut the base out of my terracotta pot using my preferred precision tool,(hammer) so it's now a tunnel. The powerhead is pushing flow directly into the hide so if anyone gets sleepy, they will get pushed out the back, and should become visible.

I'm not expecting to lose a fish, but simply had the thought because of hearing about someone else's problems.

Snail farming - Farm idea

It occurred to me a while ago that the basic aquaponics system could be adapted to growing snails. This came about partly because my lease says I'm not to have fish, but mentions nothing about snails, and partly because I couldn't help it.

Sometimes stuff just occurs to me.

My current aquaponics system looks like this. Water (and fish) at the bottom, veggies growing in an inert media in the container above.

I could just add snails to the top garden section, but they would eat everything to death within seconds.







My plan would be to restrict how much of the fresh growing vegetable matter they could get at, in the hope that the plants could be kept alive for ever.

It would look something like this.

"A" and "B" would be the normal water levels of the flood and drain cycle, And "C" would be a once or twice a day rinse to bring down solids from the snail area. Those brown things are my depiction of snails. Those green things are lettuce growing.

The snails would be in a stainless steel wire cage, which would allow them access to only the tops of plants (lettuce etc) growing in the aquaponics system.

The cage would be covered on all sides so the snails couldn't escape, and would have some terracotta pots to hide under, water, calcium supplements, and whatever else it turns out snails like.

The rinse cycle should in theory, pull solids down into the garden level, where added compost worms would digest them and spread them out,  so the nitrifying bacteria in the media could do its thing. This would in turn feed the plants that would partly feed the snails.

The system wouldn't work as an endless loop because I'll be pulling snails out for escargot. Once you eat something from the system, the removed energy needs to be replaced. That's where the veggie scraps come in. Since moving from the country where we had all kinds of scraps eating critters that did things like convert scraps to eggs, I've become a bit freaked at how much food we throw away.

Gram for gram the scraps represent almost as much as we eat. Much of it will make snail food.

So that's the plan, but plans have a habit of changing around here.

Inputs would be household kitchen scraps, and perhaps a little calcium for their shells.