by danpowell
Aquaponics Lite part 3b – more pictures and some results!
2:13 am in Nutrients, Plants, posts with pitcures!, Projects in Process by danpowell
Sorry to be bombarding you with these pictures, if you’re uninterested.
So, I’m just a few days away from the science fair, and I’m already disappointed in how rigourous I was not. If I do this for next year, I’ve got some ideas of how to really science this up.
That having been said, I’ve got the
This pea blossom is in one of the 2 "just fish water" columns.
This pea blossom is in the "CO2" column.
first blossoms from my pea plants!
The first pic, you can’t really see the blossom, but it’s in there. It’s the whitish ‘leaf’ right just up and left from centre.
The CO2 column has only been getting CO2 for the last 4 or 5 days, so there shouldn’t be loads of difference yet, even if I’m getting a meaningful amount in there.
How am I putting CO2 into this column of plants, you ask?
Read on…
If you have an aquarium that’s heavily planted with real plants, you have a nice, natural support to your filtration. Unfortunately, the heavier the plant load, the more you run up against a limit on the plants’ growth – the amount of available CO2 in the water. Since the concentration of CO2 will be roughly equivalent to that in the atmosphere, since the fish are not as great producer of CO2 as land animals, CO2 supplementation helps encourage plant growth. Now you can spend LOADS of cash on a CO2 canister with all the bells and whistles ($00s of dollars) or you can have some soda pop, and DIY a CO2 generator.
2 cups of brown sugar, spooned oh-so-slowly into a pop bottle
drill a hole 1/16" smaller than the outer diameter of the airline. Cut the airline at an angle to make threading easier. Once you've got it in, hot glue a seal on both sides of the cap.
1 tsp of quick yeast (you can go as high as 1 tbsp, some say) and 1 litre of water. Don't slop the yeast on the sides of the bottle, it won't do much good there.
One nice thing about doing this instead for hydroponics instead of for an aquarium is that for the latter you need a fancy diffuser (there are, of course, DIY options).
So I just have the other end of the CO2 airline going into the top of the bag that’s around one of my plant columns. Simple.
So, my experiment was ‘is fish water as good as commercial hydroponics fertilizer’. There are a few caveats to my investigation. #1 is that I’m not stocking at true Aquaponics densities. They fill their tanks to the gills (heh. Get it? To the gills. It’s about fish) and so have a much higher nitrogen level than I have. They would also spread this over many more plants than I am. There’s a lot of variables, is what I’m saying. At any rate, here’s a few examples of the growth.
taken March 23rd
taken April 3rd
Not a bad amount of growth for… what, 12 days?
That’s it for tonight. Thanks for your interest, and have a good night. Good luck with your veggies.
Interesting idea with the CO2. Is there a particular reason you are using brown sugar? I’m a homebrewer and generally we can use any sugar to produce carbonation, but choose white sugars like corn sugar since they don’t readily ferment byproducts. Plain ole bleached sugar and any dry/brewer’s yeast should work well. The trick in brewing is to sterilize everything and use water at room temperature (~70F). Since I’m new to gardening, I’m not sure if spores/molds/bacteria/fungi would be of long-term concern…
Very interesting, do you think you would get enough volume/force to use fermentation as an airlift system (getting rid of the need for electricity)? This would likely alter the pH quite a bit though, I would imagine.
Sorry for the lateness of my reply.
The PH drop isn’t so bad; a lot of aquarists do planted tanks (tanks with plants as the showpieces, rather than the fish) and a lot of them use DIY CO2, like I’d done (that’s where I got the recipe). They experience drops in pH, but nothing too bad. Once the carbonic acid reaches a certain level, it just stays there. The aeration of the water once it was shot out onto the clay bits at the top of the system would probably have the pH down to about normal by the time it got back to the tank.
That having been said, the amount of pressure that would have to build up to move water up 4 feet would likely put the system into a bit of a danger zone – if anything went wrong it would REALLY go wrong.
The reason I used Brown sugar is mostly just that that was what the DIY aquarists I know used.
From what I saw at the time, one of the benefits of the brown sugar was the slowness of the reaction, which allowed the same batch to work over the course of a couple of months.
I would like to know how long one mixture works.
Like your idea.