Greetings. Have not been up on this site for a while. My apologies for being out of touch and in particular to those good folks who have been trying to contact me. Out helping a friend get elected to office and then needed a break for a couple of months.
Just an update. I am pleased to see so much interest in aquaponics with classes hosted by a number of people now monthly across the city. Our work is going well. Took a year but by the results it looks like this floating farm (farm in a play pool) aquaponics redesign is working. Final tests with prawn and fish production start as soon as the water warms up then we are off to the races. Also a few systems under constructions around town including one on a local native American community. With hard work it should be a boon to Phoenix, generate a few of those vaunted green jobs and make use of some of this empty space we have around South Mountain. We are generating lots of interest so I guess we eat fish this summer.
Take care.
P.S. Couple of photos you might enjoy linked below. The red lettuce represents 2.5 months growth and is on its second cutting. The green lettuce germinated Dec. 21, 2011 (7 weeks growth).
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Good to hear from you again! It's good to hear about the beneficial projects going on. Nice crop, too!
Good to hear from you as well. How did your class go?
It was great! We had a lot of good discussion and I was able to meet a number of people who are in the forums. 1.5 hours is short, but we managed!
Hi @Sheri. I am glad you are teaching. You are doing great work and have much to share. Just as an FYI, there is also a growing group in Tucson. We are on the verge of "spawning" a new industry so we must spread the knowledge as far as possible. The more people growing the better.
So I've been hearing. I think it's great! They just had a Tucson tour; I wish we could have made it, but things have been too busy lately!
@George- This set up was basically a small body of water with styrofoam rafts covering most of it and an aerator, correct?
@Sheri- I'm sorry I couldn't make it to your class. I'm no aquaponics guru! I'm having problems with my young fish dying again... I'm assuming the big fish is somehow responsible so I'm going to harvest my big guy and then hit you up for some young tilapia if you have some available.
Hi Rachel. To directly respond to your question, yes and no. However, the idea was to simplify the concept so anyone could do it for a reasonable cost with off the shelf materials (in this case a 10 foot play pool from Wallgreens). There are however a number of operating parameters (know how issues) such as pH control, oxygen, germinating, planting, outdoor growing season, plant selection, polyculture, intercropping, construction etc., that I will be teaching in future classes. So far so good. Water use is good at about 30% of traditional gardening/farming but I think I have a small leak in the tank and also the summer heat will change things drastically as it did last year. Costs per square foot of growing area (in this case 60 ft2) have been reduced significantly which is what I wanted. Still have not worked out all the bugs but has you see, we are getting excellent results so far.
RE: Loosing fry. The big ones will eat them. If they however are just dead on the bottom, there are other issues to look at.
A couple have disappeared and I found three just dead on the bottom. These are about 3" fish.
I should add: This was the same problem I had with my last batch. They slowly died off, starting from the smaller ones. I only ended up with 4 or 5 out of about 20 that made it to table size (12"-16") It seemed like aggression, but it seems odd to me that this one big tilapia is just stabbing/biting the tiny 3" ones. There were only 7 small ones to begin with, now I'm down to 1 small one.
1000 different possibilities. However, if there is an adult male in the tank who has space to set up a breeding territory, he likely killed them. Solutions. Dramatically increase your density so that like humans on a crowed elevator territorial responses break down. Or, get the small fish out. IMHO, the latter is the best option.
Or put a cage within the tank that only small fish can enter or leave for their protection?
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