What’s new at Sahib’s – by David Hart

We are always adding different growing methods and researching new and better ways to utilize our Aquaponics knowledge so as to increase the range of what we can grow. I wanted to be able to use some soil in Aquaponics and be able to grow root vegetables while re-circulating the water. In future posts, I will highlight some of our methods and components as to one step we have taken towards this. Here I am sharing a article by my good friend and fellow Aquapon David Hart.

Enjoy!

God bless,  Sahib

Hi guys and aquapon ladies…

We’re trying something new. If you’ve tried growing any root crops in aquaponics, this might be of interest. This way, we might just end up with ‘staight carrots’…

We removed some shallow water culture troughs from one of the systems. Not because they didn’t work, they actually worked very well. The problem was, that they were above a deep water culture bed. As the sun went higher in the sky during the summer, they started to cast too much shadow onto the lower bed.
This wouldn’t of been a problem ‘if’ the beds ran North and South, but they don’t, ours are set East to West. Since we are using wasted space in a shopping center, we don’t have a lot of options on our lay out.

Here’s a shot of the troughs new location….

You can see we have them up on one set of blocks. This helps to get the drain back to the sump. The sump is to the right of the picture. It’s about 20 feet to the sump.
The pipe on the fence is the supply line.

Here’s a few shots of the new set up…

In the fore ground above….That’s five different kinds of carrots, beets and radishes.

We ran a supply line to each one, with a ball valve to control the flow. Each bed has a drain, which ties into a common header.

The bags are poly grow bags. I think they are a 5 gallon size (Maybe 4 gallons ?) They come with holes already in the bottom and part way up the sides. The bags are filled with a potting mix. Regular soil wouldn’t ‘wick up’ as well and the roots wouldn’t get as much oxygen.
The water in the troughs, is just less then an inch.

The system feeding the grow bag troughs, is our catfish system. It only has 1 IBC with about 18 very large channel cats. You can see the tank in the background of the next picture.
The 3 bell siphon tubs are fairly new too. The water exits the IBC, by the way of a SLO drain. The tubs drain back to the sump.

I hope this gives everyone some ideas…..
Your aquaponic carrots really can be straight…..