I will carry on as best as I can & for as long as I can with Aquaponics here at Bill & Bens HydroWorld.  I will try to keep the blog regularly updated but I am finding it hard to keep on top of my work load at the mo, won’t be this busy forever though!

I have separated the 5 remaining fish into these old loft water buckets I found & cleaned out.  I took a pump with a built in timer so I could fine tune the minutes that it pumps for & worked out it was 7 minutes to fill the top bucket with the plants with water from the fish bucket below.  When the pump stops the water drains back out through the pump.  I do this once an hour.  You can see the fry nursery floating on the top.  Im finding its hard to keep the fry in the nursery as every day I find some escapees?  I think its the older Tilapia crashing down onto it & pushing the top edges under water as one day I found a fish in the nursery however there are less numbers of fry which makes me think they are being eaten by the other larger Tilapia!

This new setup had to be done as you will find out later on.

I cleaned up from the last time I posted to the blog.  I rinsed the clay balls which we grow in & returned them to the grow beds.  Filled up the tank & then noticed a leak, thought I had sorted it & so started  to go through the process of cycling with Maxi Crop (as suggested by Murray Hallam in the book Aquaponic Gardening by Bernstien).  Cycling with Maxi Crop a seaweed based fertiliser (contains Ammonia which attracts the beneficial bacteria) can shorten the cycling time to 2 weeks rather than 6,  and you also have the added advantage that you can grow crops in your set up straight away.   It smells nice to begin with & then starts to stink like rotting veg that been sitting in water for to long & guess what? it leaked all in & under the tent, which wasn’t that pleasant for me or the shop.  I took the system apart again re-sealed the NFT with Aquatic Silicon & so I would like you to wish me luck as I start to cycle again today.

O yea the reason for the separate system?  The clay balls I had returned to the grow bed I believe had absorbed the Permethrin, the ingredients in the smoke bomb I used to get rid of the creepy crawlies in the tent, I believe this is the case as I found many dead worms & on the second clean up.  I don’t really think they had starved to death.

Anyways I replaced the balls & now have no good bacteria left & have to start the process again.  Thats about it for now I hope you can make it to Alice Park in Bristol this Sunday for 2pm where we will be serving a Tilapia Picnic & discussing the future Of The BFP.

Nice One

Rob