FROZEN

OK, so flood and drain is all right during the spring, summer, and fall, when it's not ridiculously cold, but when it doesn't get out of the mid-30's for days on end, and it gets below 20 every night for a week, flood and drain with an outdoor pond is not smart!

Checked on things this morning, and it appears that my aerator, though powerful enough for my pond, is not powerful enough to keep the whole damn thing from freezing over! I had 1-2" thick ice covering the entire pond, so my pond pump wasn't getting enough water to send through the system, which then caused my return line to freeze, too.

I'm just hoping that the return line doesn't crack or burst when it thaws out.

Assuming it doesn't, I'm gonna switch the pump to run 24/7, which worked last year to keep the pond ice-free for the duration of the winter, which was also quite cold. Continuous flow for the cold season.

I wondered if this was going to happen, and I now I know.

I've got the pump off today, which means that the plants won't get any water. I'm just hoping the plants survive the day while I'm at work. I'm hoping to put some water into the pond today, which should warm it up a bit, and get that pump going full steam.

BTW - putting your hands into icy pond water repeatedly to try and get the pump to go sucks when it's 18 degrees out.

UPDATE -

2-3 days have now passed since this post, and despite day time temperatures climbing above freezing all three days, the grow beds are quite literally frozen solid. I've removed the greenhouses from above them, hoping that the rain we're getting now will be able to penetrate into the hydroton and help to thaw it out. Tomorrow, it's supposed to rain and reach the upper 40's. With any luck, everything will thaw out and the return lines will drain. If that happens, I'll be able to turn everything back on. Even if that does happen, I wonder if the plants are still alive, as their roots are quick literally frozen into a block of ice right now. Should be interesting!

UPDATE 12/12 -

Got 2 out of the 3 growbeds going again. The 3rd is still frozen in the return line. The arugula there doesn't look it will make it. Many of the leaves look translucent, as if all the chlorophyll has abandoned the plant. Nevertheless, I'd still like to get the flow going again, though it's supposed to be even colder tomorrow night than it was last week. Based on last year, though, as long as the water was flowing, it never completely froze over or through, and everything was still working. We'll see...

Trouble with German Johnson's

From the beginning, they seemed a bit weak in the system. I bought them as organic seedlings from Whole Foods. They just never seemed to take well to my aquaponics system, though they had 3 very large tomatoes (still green) on them. For the past week, they've looked weak and wilted, as if they weren't getting enough water. I tried giving them a little boost of nutrients, I tried pouring fresh water over their roots, and I tried cutting the water level down a little. Nothing - they remained wilted. I finally pulled them up yesterday, 'cause they simply didn't look like they were going to make it. The roots looked pretty rotten.

Doesn't make sense, as there are several other tomato plants in that same grow bed, and all are doing fine and producing fruit and looking healthy.

So, maybe it's just that German Johnson's don't do too well in aquaponics (or my aquaponics)? Or maybe I just had a couple of weak plants.

Will try them again next year to see if they consistently perform poorly in my system.

Update and a Reminder

First, the reminder:
- Once your plants are well established and large, you should check your drains periodically (maybe every 2 weeks) for root invasion. Roots grow very quickly and will spread throughout your grow beds. One of the best spots for a root to find is the drain, as it has a nice flow and a steady supply of nutrients. If you aren't vigilant, you may find that your drains have clogged with roots, and your grow beds will overflow.

Now the update:
See for yourself. Things are looking good. Tomatoes are large and healthy. Shouldn't be too much longer before they start to turn color. Some varieties are more prolific than others. Cherokee purple's are probably doing the best in terms of making the most fruit. Also doing well are the Amish pastes and the Brandywines. Not doing so well are the Pineapple somethings and the Moonglows, which only have about 2 tomatoes each on the vine. Not sure why this would be - it could be a great many things. Maybe they like a different pH? Maybe they need more or less sun? Maybe they need more or less water/nutrients? Or maybe they just take longer to get going?

Also, you can see that the yellow squash is repeating the feats of last year by showing MONSTROUSLY large leaves. It seemed at first that they were more normal-sized, but at this point, they are MUCH larger than the squash I have in the dirt. Also, you have to be careful to not leave the fruit on the vine too long. You go away for the weekend and come back to squash the size of bowling pins!

Problem Solved!

I went with the cheap and easy option - elbows! Found a neat little piece of conduit in the electrical department for the overflow ($3). Kinda looks like this:

          ------(
)-----/

Happened to have some 2" pipe and a 2" elbow, and had some leftover aquarium caulk.

So, I put in the piece I bought (middle), put in the 2" elbow (and a lot of caulk), had to move the pump outlet over a little (the pipe on the right was longer, so that the pump was centered in the skimmer) to make room for the previous two items (and added a lot of caulk), and voila!

Did all of this just in time for the 2.5" of rain we got yesterday. Now the pond is at an all-time high level, with probably an extra 300+ gallons in it from before.

Took the opportunity to update the veggie photos.

Broccoli looking really good. I cut a bunch of it already, fearing that I would somehow let it sit too long again and have it flower.

Tomatoes, broccoli, strawberries, squash, etc.

Basil, tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, etc.

Small Problem - Losing water on the drain cycle

OK, so flood/drain is definitely working out well for the plants, and I'm pretty sure that the fish like the bubbles when they kick on. It reminds me of Finding Nemo ... "bubbles!!!"

However, and this may be a problem unique to my set up, the cycling is causing me to lose water, and the equilibrium level of water is less than optimal. Here's what's happening...

In my pond, I have a skimmer with the pond pump at the bottom. The idea behind the skimmer is obvious - it allows you to catch stuff floating on the top before it sinks and then gets sucked into the pump. Now, whether that works as well as it should is another matter that I don't want to get into here. At the back of the skimmer is an outlet for the electrical cord from the pump to go underground to the outlet. There is also an overflow outlet that goes out the back, travels on a french-drain like gravelly-path to a small pit that I dug underground and lined with gravel and sand. This works quite well for keeping the pond from overflowing.

Here's the catch, though. While the pump is pumping, the 3 tubs with plants are filled with water. When the pump shuts off, that water drains out from the tubs and into the pond, raising the water level. When the water level reaches the overflow drain, the water flows out of the system.

I am most comfortable with the water level when it is just below the level of the drain, but as you can see, this is not currently possible for very long. Every time the tubs drain out and the water level comes up, I lose water until the maximum water level (when the pump is off) is below the overflow drain.

What I need is a way to automatically seal the overflow when the pump kicks off - or, better yet, seal the entrance to the skimmer. This way, the pond can handle the extra water, as there's plenty of space in the pond before it overflows.

If not that, I need to re-engineer my overflow so that it can somehow store the water while the pump is off and the level is higher until the pump kicks back on and it can handle the additional volume.

Any suggestions?

Back in business

I'm back in business. So, the rubber containers ("buckets") that I've been using had this pre-installed metal-threaded bulkhead fitting/outlet that I used as my drain. Problem was that they were only about 1/2" diameter, so thin, that a single piece of gravel could get stuck inside it and clog it up. That was the cause of the disaster.

So, what I had to do was to try and push all my hydroton/gravel to the other side of the bucket while attempting to not kill any plants, remove the metal-threaded bulkhead fitting, drill out a larger hole, and then install. I used 1" pipe this time, probably still not wide enough, but a major improvement. I've heard the occassional piece of hydroton getting sucked clean through, so I think the risk of clogging is lessened.

I also followed the recommendation of every single other aquaponics person in the universe and put in a standpipe with the cut out "V" at the top. I don't understand why that makes such a difference, but trust me, it does! The suction is now pretty impressive. I drilled plenty of holes through the standpipe to allow the water to fill in and drain out before it even gets to the top "V", and given that my water is running constantly, I found that the more holes I had, the more flow I could give the bucket without overtopping the standpipe and flooding the plants.

From everything I've read, people use the flood/drain system to ensure that the roots have enough oxygen to avoid root rot. Given that my pump is also operating the waterfall for my pond (more of an aesthetic purpose), I choose to let my pump run all the time. I find that the plants seem to do well enough that I don't notice the difference. Maybe they'd be even bigger if they had some time to breathe fresh air! Given that the water doesn't stay all the way at the surface, part of the root system is always getting some oxygen, so that should help.

My next system will likely be aquaponics only, so I'll try out a timer and do a flood/drain type of thing. I'm looking forward to not having to run the pump 24/7 from an electricity-use standpoint, as well.

Disaster

Well, I'm not surprised this happened, but I'm still not happy about it either. My middle bucket, with the tomatoes, cucumbers, and basil, is now defunct. The drain clogged with a big piece of gravel that I was not able to remove. I had to cut out the drain. So, then I figured I might as well make it a little wider, and I desperately (and hastily) tried to drill out a new drain and pipe it in. The seal wasn't good enough, and the thing was leaking. In the day or so that this all went down, I tried to keep the plants alive by putting them in a big cooler with the pond water, changing the water as frequently as I could, but to no avail. With the drain leaking and all the plants looking droopy and 95% dead, it wasn't worth continuing. So, it's now shut off for now while I figure out how to stop the leak. Of all the buckets to go, why did it have to be that one??

Lesson here is that the drain needs to be 1) larger diameter (probably at least twice) of the incoming flow and 2) large enough for gravel or hydroton to flow through easily without plugging it up.

I also need to read up on how drains work, 'cause I noticed yesterday while I was checking for leaks that despite the larger diameter pipe, the water wasn't really flowing out very quickly. I'm thinking there is some sort of pressure thing going on that I don't understand.

End of Summer Update

Well, I've shut down my two garden buckets for the winter. It was winding down anyway, and then we had a ton of rain from a TS that exacerbated my one tilted bucket. So, it made sense to shut down and prepare for a re-tooling for next Spring. This winter, I'll be building a level platform for three buckets to sit upon. And I think I'm going to try to run PVC pipe across the top of each bucket in a grid pattern to drip water down, rather than dumping all the water into one end of the bucket. This new approach will allow me to drain from the bottom, rather than the top, which should completely avoid any of my over-spilling issues that I had this year. More pipe = more costs, yes, but I think the effort will be worth it. I also plan to design in such a way as to be able to easily add more bucket capacity, should I want to or need to. Here are some more flowery shots from the pond area.

Great blue lobellia

Swamp sunflower

Tall tickseed

Bullfrog (thanks web4deb)

3 Important Lessons Learned & Documenting a Mid-Season Major Fix

Now that summer is in full swing, I have a pond full of fish (if only they were tilapia...), and the pond has had a few months to carve out its own little environmental niche in my backyard, I can share 3 important lessons that I've learned.

Lesson 1: Don't buy a pump with "pre-filters" or a "clean-water" pump. Buy a pump that can handle solids.

So, I started off with the Dynatec 1350 Pond Pump, because I wasn't really sure how many gallons my pond had, and I didn't want to get too much pump. After about a month, it became clear that I needed a stronger pump, so I got the Dynatec 1500 Pond Pump. It was the same size, which made swapping out the old for the new very easy, but had a little more power. Though I was impressed at first, I started having the problems with flow, and it turned out that the little sponge "pre-filter" was getting covered in algae and basically choking the pump. I could fix it easily by putting on a clean filter or cleaning the filter that was on there, but it started to become a hassle. I also noticed that if I just tried to clean the filter, sometimes I'd only get a day or two before it got clogged again.

So, I decided to upgrade the pump, and I went with a Little Giant K-3000 pump. It's bigger and a lot more powerful, but the nice thing is that it can handle solids up to 3/4" or so. Plus, the water in the pond is moving like crazy now, and I think that it finally might actually be turning the water over 1-2 times per hour like it's supposed to.
Here is the Little Giant. It was bigger, and ended up taking up a bunch more space. I took out the big green filter that comes with the skimmer and just put the leaf netting right in front of the pump. It's basically the first thing that anything coming into the skimmer sees. One benefit I've noticed with the increased flow is that the algae is getting sucked into the skimmer and is collecting on the leaf netting. Simple - pull the netting out, shake it a bit, and algae is gone!

That brings me to ...

Lesson 2: Gravel slows the water down a lot, so you need more outflow capacity than inflow capacity, because the water will be moving slower going out than it is going in.

Sure, this is something that makes sense and that I thought about before I put the system together, but I definitely underestimated how it all would work. The upshot is that when I attached the new, more powerful pump, all of my buckets were overflowing! I tried for a while to find the right setting for the ball valves, but I just couldn't find the sweet spot. In the end, I settled on extra drainage from one of the buckets using garden hose siphons. This brings me to...

Lesson 3: Make sure your buckets are level! And even if they start off level, they may settle. They may settle a lot!

Sometimes in the morning, I'd go out and check on things, and I'd notice that the water level was way down in the pond. Sure enough, I'd see some water trickling over one side of a bucket. Since those things weigh around a ton with gravel and water, there's no way of jacking it up to fix that, so the only thing you can do is turn down the in-flow to lower the water level. This only works so long until you don't have enough flow to keep the plants happy.

This happened to one of my garden buckets, but it also happened to the wetland plant bucket quite frequently. There was nothing else for me to do but redo the wetland bucket, and that's what I worked on this weekend.
Here you can see all the hose siphons coming in. Due to the settling of the wetland bucket (just out of the picture at the top and the settling of one of the garden buckets (off to the left but not in the picture), siphons were the only way to keep the water from flowing over the sides of the buckets.

And now on to the weekend's project - empty the wetland bucket (while trying to ensure the survival of all the plants in it), add in extra drainage, level it, reposition, add back all the gravel, rebuild the waterfall to accommodate the extra drainage, and then enjoy!

First, I removed all the plants and put them in this big cooler. I put some gravel in the bottom and filled it with water, just like how it was in the bucket. Only difference is that the water wasn't moving. I put the cooler under a tree so that it would have good shade during the heat of the day.

Then, I removed all the gravel from the bucket. If you've ever wondered how much gravel a 110 gallon plastic tub from Tractor Supply holds, well, there it is! If I remember correctly, it's about 8-9 wheelbarrow loads.

After taking apart the waterfall and a good bit of the rock wall surrounding the bucket (needed to do that to get the bucket out), I added sand and gravel to the bit of ground that the bucket sits on to help get it level. I also had to redo the waterfall to accommodate a new, low drain pipe. Pictured below are all three drain pipes (looking down). The top one is not necessary, but that was where the old drainage was, and I already had a hole, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to put an emergency drainage pipe there just to plug the hole. Also, all of my pipe is 1.5" pipe, but I added in a 2" pipe (PVC white in the photo) to ensure that the darn bucket wouldn't overflow ever again, even if it went off-kilter.
So, after the fish-safe, aquarium epoxy set for 24 hours, I filled up the bucket to test for leaks and see how things looked. Everything seemed to be working well, so I added the gravel back. After the gravel went back in, the water level wouldn't get any higher than the top of the bottom drain pipe! WHAT?! Before, it was overflowing - that was the whole point of this exercise - if I add in more drainage, then it won't overflow. But now, all of a sudden, it didn't need it! Frustrating. The waterfall is supposed to have water flowing down it!
So, after much pondering, I took a hose clamp and tightened it down on the end of the outflow pictured above. It got pretty tight, but it definitely worked, and the water level came up high enough to start to flow out the PVC tube and then down the waterfall! Sure, most of the flow comes out of the bottom pipe, but there's good water coming down from above, and it all blends in nicely. The sound is stronger than ever, and the fish really seem to like it.
With the water flowing well, I added the wetland plants back in, and the project was finished!