Ok and now for something completely dispergent. Hydroquaponics - TopicsExpress

Ok and now for something completely dispergent. Hydroquaponics made easy by Danny® coming soon to a water reservoir near you. You know Im so lazy I HATE watering, mulching, fertilizing, weeding, measuring pH... setting up pumps and having leaky tubing running every which way among fifteen different tanks..... well folks this is all in the past thanks to my revolutionaristic time travel aquaponics system back to 1915. But first, let me tell you about myself. Hi, my name is Danny and if youre like me, Im a lot like you. I grew up in a simpler environment where we didnt buy fertilizer for the garden, we got manure from the farmer across the way in return for letting his cows graze on our land - that and a spare rooster every month or so. I didnt even knew plastic grocery bags existed. Ok, Im getting bored with the infowebomercial video myself. So I wanted something which would float and still allow the plants to send their roots down to the water for the nitrogen-rich detritus we call fish poop, and letting the fish perhaps nibble a little at the roots but not all the way, and something that did not involve pumps or filters or cleaning or heating or.... whatever else I consider work or to much hassle and expense. I didnt want the platforms free floating, but didnt want to just anchor them: I wanted something which would respond to the water level, so I came up with the counterweight. I built the first tray but failed to realize the pull the counterweight would have despite the weight of the tray, so it was largely a mock-up of the Titanic, you know, later in the movie, and we so knew how well that worked. So I made the second tray (pic #1) with the counterweight attached in the middle of it and (pic #2) with extra wood underneath to lift it out of the water just that much more. I used as few screws as possible, because after all, its not a weightbearing structure and screws are heavy. So in pic#3 you can see the counterweight; the string is looped thru a 1/2x24 galvanized iron pipe nestled inside a 1x24 iron pipe. The string is fastened via friction with a knot on the end wedged under the end pieces. The tray is 32 long (exactly 1/3 of an 8 length of 2x4) and being 4 boards across, its 14 (not 16) and the end boards are of course 11. It turns out its the perfect size for 6 seedlings. With the string like that you can carry the tray slung over your shoulder, or around your neck if you need to make some extra money at the ball park on the weekends. Candy ? Cigarettes ? Cabbage ? So pick a medium - I narrowed it down to bark nuggets, lava rock or wood shavings. The lava rock bothers me because its just too solid and doesnt degrade so its just a messy mix; earth with rocks. The nuggets float, but the shredded wood doesnt much, its called NoFloat but small pieces still float, but as you can see, altogether it stays put. I put some of the medium on the bottom just to cover the wood then I lay out my seedlings to see where theyre going to go and then I heap more medium around them and then cover the whole thing so it stays below the top of the edges of the tray and I compress it as much as I can. I dont overfill it because the seedlings are going to grow but at the same time the medium is going to compact some more over time. So viola, a cabbage patch®. Well see if the cypress kills the plants or if its too MOIST and the roots rot. Its still in the SPEARMINT stage. But to pull it a bit more out of the water you simply... hang more weight onto the counterweight ! Maybe Ill need to do that as the cabbage (and maybe the kale) grows. However, I CAN tell you from my research that ratquaponics will not work as anticipated. I didnt think rats could swim. Welllll.... I was wrong. Check out the aftermath in my Kale tray. I caught Pink in the act. They dogpaddle like beavers. So THAT set-up might need some tweaking or just use it for fish only, which I will do for now. Lemon learned. By the way, if youre not into fish as much as me or Mackenzie Berg, you can easily adapt this setup for hydroponics (aquaponics is growing fish with plants, hydroponics is growing plants with fish or some other kind of fertilizer) and just float it in a reservoir of water and nutrients... kitty litter maybe ???