Aquaponics - Growing carrots idea

I'm told growing carrots can be tricky in an aquaponics grow bed. I wouldn't know, because I've never done it. But that's not going to stop me from offering tips on the subject.

From what I've read in dirt gardening, carrots need to be planted into a bed with old fertilizer. This, I'm told, is to stop them growing legs, arms, heads, and fingers, and getting top dollar on e-bay for looking like a religious figurine. Food based religious figurines make particularly good money it seems.

So, now new fertilizer, and deep garden beds. I forgot to mention deep garden beds.

I suspect the problem with aquaponics, is that there is nutrient everywhere. This is great for most things, but annoying if you want your plants tap root to grow straight down. As I understand it, you can still grow carrots, but peeling them is like doing micro-surgery because they grow all over the shop and as a result, there is no real carroty bit.

I was reading about someone struggling with this problem when I remembered the dirt garden advice I was given, and figured I might have a solution.

If the carrot takes all the nutrient from the surface, and then grows down looking for more, perhaps all we need to do is drop the nutrient rich water level as the carrot grows.

The easiest way I can think to do this, would be to grow carrots in their own grow bed, and adjust the high tide level down each week as the carrots grow by changing the length of the standpipe.

I think I'll do an experiment with two buckets. One using the new method, and a control bucket that floods and drains like my normal grow bed. If I get rich from selling the idol looking ones on ebay, I can conclude my new system is a winner for growing normal looking carrots.



If this is not an original idea, I did my best (within reason) to discover blah blah blah

Aquaponics - Silver perch eating lettuce

I finally managed to get some video of my fish eating lettuce.

I left the camera running for hours and eventually got a few hits. They seem to eat a lot of it overnight, but hardly touch it during the day. Perhaps it draws too much attention to themselves.

Here is all the feeding I managed to capture from all those hours of footage. The first scene doesn't really catch them feeding, but I like it so I left it in. There was a lot of footage where they spent time hanging around under the lettuce as they did in the first scene. Perhaps the water tastes nice under the lettuce.