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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Step 6 - Plant your seedlings

Once you have assembled your system and you have added your water and growmedium, you are ready to start cycling your system. Basically this comes down to running your system without fish for about a week until your bacterial collony is established. I like to start by planting a few plants at this time as well.

Although you are able to start you plants from seed in an aquaponics system, I prefer to use seedings. This is where this start to get a bit wierd and seem to go against common sense. Nobody ever said this was going to be logical, just easy.

Get a bucket full of rain water or if you have good enough water(see step 5) then use tap water. Start by carefully removing your seedling from the tray. Wash the roots gently in the bucket of water to remove as much of the soil as possible without damaging the roots system too much(a little damage is inevitable).

Then dig a hole in your gravel(or grow medium of your choice). Place the seedling in the hole a gently cover the roots with your grow medium. This part just freaked me out the first time, I just could not get past the idea of planting plants in stones instead of soil.

Now that everything is set up you need to keep your plants alive until you have added the fish. I do this by adding liquid plant food called seagro. Be sure to use organi stuff only from now on or you could end up poisoning your fish or yourself. Check out this video clip to see how I do it. I also throw about a handful of fishfood into the system at this time. It will breakdown and begin to rot which will create amonia and this is just what your bacterial need to feed on so that they can establish themselves in your system.

You will want to keep testing the water over the next few days, when you start to see an increase in the level of nitrates in your system you know you are getting close to the time where you can add your fish.

- Grant

1 comment:

Agriculture said...

Hydroponics is a type of horticulture and a subset of general hydroponics flora series , which is a method of growing plants, usually crops, without soil, by using mineral nutrient solutions in an aqueous solvent.