Expanding my Aquaponics System

I picked up a lot of great ideas at the Aquaponics Association convention.  Now I have to decide which are best for my limited space.  I plan to float an extruded styrene raft on top of my fish tank.  It will provide shade for the fish in the open part of the tank as well as providing some nutrition for the koi I plan to use instead of fish that I could eat.  As a semi-vegetarian my protein needs are better met by my 4 hens.  Furthermore, the regulations on growing fish for food in Utah create an insupportable cost factor ($100 dollars for a license).
  I plan to integrate horizontal growing trays for lettuce and similar herbs like I saw at Green Sky Aquaponics and 'The Land' at Epcot.  I will plumb them with a hose so I can move the wheeled table on which they stand in order to move from place to place in my greenhouse. 

Convention Starts Today

I'm in sunny Florida where I plan to attend the Aquaponics Association Conference being held near Disney World.  Although my fish have not thrived, I've had success wit my grow bins.  Beet greens are one of my favorite vegetables.  Beet sees planted in expanded shale don't grow bulbs, but they do produce a lovely crop of greens.  My tomato plants are growing lots of fruit.  I have tried growing seedlings in vermiculite to transplant to my grow beds but I have found that direct sowing of the seeds into the media is far more productive. 

Good Site for Growing Information

http://www.thevga.co.uk/index.cgi  provides information on growing zones for various vegetables, including information about greenhouses.

Moving right along.

My grow beds are happily growing but I think I overfed my gold fish.  I still have a couple of hardy survivors but the rest turned belly up.  My main activity this week has been harvesting and dehydrating 'golden' plums from the tree that grows next to the greenhouse where I have my hydroponics setup.  I was just getting prepared to go back and pick fruit when a number of my grandkids showed up.  The older children, 7, 6, and 5, really like picking plums.  I gave each of them a small plastic bucket and provided a table they could stand on.  They got busy and harvested a peck of nice plums which I have turned into dehydrated fruit.  I used a steel tube apple corer to remove the pits, taking more of the 'meat' than I liked, but far more efficient than any other method I tried.  Plums really hang on to their pits and most of the fruit directly around the  pit is somewhat more sour than I like. 

Tricking my Brown Thumb

I carefully planted seeds in vermiculite and waited for seedlings to show.  The few seedlings I saw were quickly identified as products of a fall of elm seed disks from a huge elm tree in a neighbor's yard, but no sign of the carrots, beets, parsnips, or tomatoes that I planted.  Finally I went ahead and purchased some weedy looking tomato plants for a deep discount along with dill and parsley that was similarly low in cost.  They began to thrive in the grow beds.  A week ago I tossed some year-old beets seeds in the beds, with a fatalistic feeling that since they weren't getting any fresher, they were just as well off adding organic matter to the grow bed.  Surprise!  The beet seedlings are showing up as pretty little green leaves on red stalks.

Larvae Harvest, Plants thriving

First BFL harvest this morning!
I found three large larvae- 3/4" long and black, in the catch bin this morning.  I took them down and fed them to my chickens.  For the next few days I'm putting the harvest bucket in a shady place near a spot where I put some food scraps under a layer of wood compost.  I plan to let any that come out of the bin in the next few days find their way to a place where they can become flies and breed.   It took a week from putting little white larvae in my collector bin to the appearance of the mature larvae.
Also, the grow bins in my aquaponics setup are doing well.  I planted various herbs, a squash and some tomatoes and all are apparently thriving five days after being planted. 

Win Some----

I planted a lot of seeds in vermiculite and waited for them to grow as I finished setting up my system.  Alas, my dread brown thumb curse seems to have struck.  The only seedlings popping up have been a few errant elm seedlings, and I have been harvesting a lot of those from my grow tanks.  While shopping for a few extra feeder bases for my chickens I purchased bedding plants at at 75% discount, making them almost disposable if they don't thrive.  While planting them I had evidence that the red worms are spreading through the bins.