Goldfish Barrelponics - mini aquaponics in a barrel

A few years ago I had a small aquarium that had no filter and was cleaned using aquaponics.  It was a tiny system with Endler's livebearers, and it worked incredibly well.  

I recently tried a tinier aquaponics in a jar, which failed miserably.  I have a few ideas which could possibly make it successful.  I need to write a post on that.  

I would love to try a larger aquaponics system with edible fish some day, but fish food is so expensive that I just can't see how it could ever be financially viable.  So for now I will focus on ornamental fish which I already have and am already buying food for them, rather than trying to grow and harvest edible fish.

I currently have a barrel full of goldfish.  I have only had them for a few months, but so far they are growing well and looking healthy.  I decided to make my barrel into a little barrel aquaponics system. 

Various herbs in a floating pot, growing well

 

Winter is coming, and I know some plants will only grow well over summer while others will do better over winter.  I only have room for one little floating pot at the moment so I decided to plant a mix of herbs and other edible things.  

I planted silverbeet, Vietnamese coriander, water celery, spearmint, and have recently added native river mint.

The native river mint has not been in long enough for me to comment on its growth.  It is growing larger and I have high hopes for it to perform well in here.

I had expected the silverbeet to perform the best out of all these plants in the cooler weather.  So far it has performed poorly, it is alive but not really growing and certainly not thriving.  I am not sure what the problem is, maybe it needs a larger pot volume for the roots, or maybe it just needs more time.  I don't think its roots have grown into the water yet.

Spear mint is a garden thug and loves damp places, so should perform well.  So far it has not fared too well, I think this is due to the cooler weather.  It is growing slowly, and is dropping leaves.  Mint tends to go partly dormant over winter here, so I am not expecting to see a lot of growth from it until things warm up a little.

Water celery has done well, it survives pretty much anything.  Hot, cold, wet, dry, blasting sun, part shade, it always survives.  I had a feeling it would do well in a floating pot, and it has.  Over winter it usually does not grow a lot.  It gets nice colours when the temperature drops.  So far it has done well and is getting larger.

The real stand out so far is the Vietnamese coriander.  This herb generally does not like cooler weather, but has grown like crazy since I put an unrooted cutting in this floating pot.  I suspect most of the roots in the water are from this plant.  Perhaps over winter it will die back somewhat, or maybe it will be protected enough to keep growing, time will tell.  I am confident it will survive and be one of the first to spring into growth when spring hits.  If it grows this well over autumn I can hardly wait to see what it can do over spring and summer!

The roots are growing longer, maybe I won't need a spawning mop in spring

Initially the fish were eating the plant roots as soon as they protruded from the pot.  Now the roots are growing faster than they are being eaten.  This is good as it means the plants have more access to nitrates etc in the water.  I took the above photo a week or two ago, the roots are probably triple that length now, which is a good sign.

I had planned on putting a spawning mop in the barrel in spring, if the roots grow long enough this may not be needed.  Time will tell, perhaps once the fish are larger and the weather is warmer they may devour the roots.

Very simple set up

The barrel only has a small air water interface, it is deep and holds a lot of water, and very little of the water is exposed to the air for gas exchange.  

I have a pot of plants floating on the surface which is reducing the surface area.  I also tend to have some azolla and duckweed on the surface, this is eaten by the fish but while it lasts it reduces the surface area even more.  

The fish are all using oxygen from the water, as are the plant roots, this combined with such a small surface area could be problematic.  I could try to grow some oxygenator plants in the water, but the goldfish eat them out too fast for them to make any noticeable difference to dissolved oxygen levels.

Goldfish are pretty hardy, and can gulp air if needed, but I like my fish.  If I don't want to be cruel to my little fish I needed to put in a pump to oxygenate the water.

I have a small solar pump which brings water from the bottom of the barrel to the surface where is gets oxygenated.  I was originally pumping it straight back into the barrel.  This was not oxygenating as well as I had hoped as it was just a continuous stream of water.  It was increasing the surface area and circulating the water, which is fine in cooler weather, but it needed something better if it is to work well on warmer days.

I then tried pumping the water through a small pot full of gravel, which was working much better.  This pot of gravel breaks up the stream of water and makes it splash and bubble into the barrel.  Much more oxygen plus the fish seem to enjoy swimming through the stream of splashing water.

water pumped through a tiny pot of gravel

azolla and duckweed are eaten by the fish

The little pot of gravel did a great job at breaking the flow of water, but did little for housing the nitrifying bacteria and improving water quality.  Now I have a milk bottle of gravel that I pump the water through.  

The milk bottle provides more gravel and housing sites for the good bacteria, and should slightly lower nitrates in the water column.  The water splashes out of the milk bottle and oxygenates the barrel water.  I haven't planted anything in it yet but it is large enough that I will be able to grow a few plants in there.

I have some wire on top of the barrel to prevent birds from stealing the fish.  At the moment I sit the milk bottle on top of that.  It is easy enough to lift this off whenever I want to feed the fish or whatever.  The fish are really interactive, so it is nice to lift off the wire and be able to see them better.

Milk bottle of gravel to be used as a small grow bed

The barrel full of fish

I know what you are thinking, and you are correct.  That tiny pot of herbs along with a milk bottle of gravel is not enough to clean an entire barrel's worth of water.  

At the moment the weather is cooling and the fish are not eating much, they not producing much waste, so the small floating pot of herbs along with the azolla and duckweed is going ok.  I am also doing small water changes each week, and putting the nutrient rich water on fruit trees and on the vegetable garden.  At this point in time this is keeping the nitrates low enough.

Hopefully my little fish all survive the winter.  Once the weather warms the fish will eat more, and grow more, and they will produce significantly more waste.  

I have plans for a small flood and drain grow bed to put on top of the barrel.  I plan to pump the water through the grow bed instead of the milk bottle of gravel.  I would love to grow some nutrient hungry vegetables up there including tomatoes and kangkong (I love kangkong).  I don't want to do that until after winter has ended.

Strawberry Raspberry hybrids - test results

I attempted to hybridise a strawberry with a raspberry, and I wrote numerous blog posts along the way documenting the progress. 

I produced a few F1 plants, and from them some F2 plants.  These plants displayed various morphological differences from both parent species.  The plants looked superficially similar to a strawberry, and a lot of aggressive people said this cross was impossible, so I could not be certain that they were true hybrids without getting them independently tested.  

The CSIRO offered to test some leaf samples for me to determine if they were hybrids.  Long story short, based on protein and peptide level evidence it appears that the F1 and F2 plants are intergeneric strawberry raspberry hybrids.  

No one has ever achieved this cross before.  This means my plants are the first ever documented intergeneric hybrids between strawberry (Fragaria sp) and raspberry (Rubus sp). 

The results can be seen below.  The set size represents the number of peptides detected from the samples (multiple peptides make a protein at the end).  The number on top of each column represents the peptides detected from each sample type.  You can see that the HF2 is completely different from each parent species and HF1. 

Strawberry Raspberry Hybrid - proteomics results

 The below chart represents the top 20 peptide functional classes associated with the four sample type.  These results also show the similarity and dissimilarity between the sample types based on their measured peptides.

My first F1 plants germinated in 2017 and the F2 in 2019.  It has been such a long process that I was starting to worry that I would never have these tested, or that the results would be inconclusive.  It is great to have such definitive results. 

My strawberry raspberry hybrids are vigorous and set a lot of fruit.  The taste of these strawberry x raspberry hybrids varies from plant to plant from sour to bland to really incredible.  

While there is a naming convention for binomial nomenclature, giving them a common name may be more difficult.  My daughter wants to call them "Stinkleberries".  I kind of love that name, but don't think people would want to eat them.

Below are some pictures of the leaf samples.  I have described many of the morphological differences in previous blog posts.

F1 above, strawberry and raspberry parents below

F1 above, strawberry parent below

F2 on left, F1 on right

Leaf samples that I sent

I'm not sure what to do from here.  These F1 and F2 plants could potentially be crossed with other species or other hybrids.  This holds a lot of potential for breeding new plants with increased disease resistance and/or novel tasting berries without using genetic engineering. 

It is amazing to think that this was thought to be impossible yet was achieved in my back yard, in my spare time, with no specialised equipment, and extremely limited access to germplasm.  Imagine what could be done if I had more time and money to invest in projects like this.  

If you want to help me in my plant breeding projects such as this feel free to buy something through my for sale page or even donate a few dollars to me through my PayPal.

Leaf insects

I bought my son some spiny leaf insects for Christmas.  They were rather small when we got them.  They have grown so much!

My son wants to hatch the eggs when the time comes.  We ended up getting three females and one male.  They are parthenocarpic so can produce viable eggs without a male, but having a male should make the offspring a little stronger and healthier. 

Female

Male

The female is fat and spiny

The male is smoother and skinnier

Female spiny leaf insect on the left, male on the right

They eat eucalyptus leaves, don't make much sound, and look pretty cool.  Other than that I don't have much to say about them.

Pink Gem Corn

I grew some glass gem corn with the kids.  I planted the seeds in blocks of similar colours.  Some of the pinks grew almost exclusively pink cobs.

Glass gem corn carries a lot of recessive genes, so much like the cobs below these will still throw the odd seed of a different colour. They still look very pretty and are loved by my daughters.

I saved the seeds from the pink cobs separately from the mixed coloured cobs.  If planted in a block it should produce cobs that are almost entirely pink, with just a few kernels of other colours.  I removed most of the different colour seeds, but left in some of the purple and some of the blue that my kids thought looked more purple.  I also left in some of the whites as they seemed to be light pink rather than true white.

All of these carry at least one gene for pink colour.  Unless they are planted too close to other corn and are cross pollinated, they should produce cobs as pink as the ones above.

If you want to grow pink popcorn I sell the pink gem corn seeds through my for sale page.

Pink Gem Popcorn

Fish in a barrel

I played around with aquaponics on a very small scale a few years ago.  I had a small tank of ornamental fish in a classroom.  The water stayed pristine, the fish thrived and the plants did remarkably well.  

My kids have been bugging me for a few years to get fish again.  We have no space in the house for a tank.  I do have some barrels outside, so thought I could put fish in one of them.  

Goldfish are hardy and long lived.  They can survive in clean water as well as dirty water, they can survive in warm water as well as under ice.  Goldfish can eat a wide range of foods, many of which I can grow for free and I will only need to buy some of their food.  So I decided to get some goldfish.

One problem I faced is that goldfish are expensive here.  Locally they are about $9 each for smaller, not very colourful fish, and more for better looking or larger fish.  

Then I found a place online that posts live fish.  They had a deal where I could get ten posted to me for much the price I would have spent buying three locally.  I have never had fish posted before, but they had a live fish guarantee so I figured I would give it a go.  

I could have bought ten comet goldfish, or the same price to get ten shubunkin goldfish, so I had to make a decision. 

Goldfish when they arrived in the post

I love shubunkin, they are prettier than most common goldfish and have an array of colours.  Comets tend to be orange, or sometimes have a little white.

The choice was easy enough to make.  I ordered some shubunkin goldfish.

Shubunkin tend to be less inbred than many other varieties of goldfish, they have short single fins, and long bodies, meaning that they suffer from fewer of the ailments that often kill fancy goldfish. They are colourful and meant to be one of the hardier breeds.

Who knew goldfish cope so well being posted interstate!

When the fish first arrived they were terrified, and were rather pale in colour.  All were alive and looked remarkably well.

They were active and it didn't take them long to colour up quite a lot.  In the beginning they tried to stay down the bottom of the barrel where it was difficult to see them.  They were scared, and I was worried that some would die in the first few days while the barrel was cycling.  I put some wire over the top to protect my new fish from birds.

For the first few days I fed them duckweed and mosquito wrigglers.  That way they could eat when they wanted and not have to worry about me looming overhead.  After they associated me with food I started to also feed fish food.  Now they come to the top of the barrel anytime they hear me.  I now feed them some fish food.  They are remarkably interactive fish, which makes feeding time quite fun.

I keep hearing how goldfish don't stop eating and will gorge themselves and eat to death, but mine only eat a little fish food and then stop.  If I put a lot of duckweed on they will eat a lot, and then stop.  Some times it takes a few days for them to eat all the duckweed.

Goldfish, duckweed, and floating plants

I bought a little submersible pump/filter, floated a pot of plants to help remove some nitrates, and have plans for a flood/drain grow bed for when the weather warms up.  Until I put in a grow bed I am also doing 10% water changes each week, this water goes to the vegetable garden or to fruit trees so nothing is wasted.

Most days I put a scoop of duckweed on the top of the water.  The duckweed is great but only lasts a little while before my fish eat it.  Luckily I have a lot of it growing in other containers so I can scoop more of it in each day.  I also give them scoops of azolla but they struggle to eat that because their mouths are a bit too small.  

Some of the larger azolla has stayed there for a long time, I am happy with this as it would be removing a tiny amount of the nutrients from the water. 

I try to always have a little duckweed or azolla in there so they always have something to eat.  They seem to prefer duckweed to fish food.

My barrel full of fish

I am not a photographer and find it almost impossible to photograph fish.  They are beautifully coloured, each is uniquely coloured, they are very active, rather interactive, and the kids find them interesting to watch.  

I got them mid March and they have doubled in size over the past month or so.  The plants in the floating pot have also exploded in growth, which is a good sign that they are removing some of the nutrients from the water.  At first the fish were eating all the roots, but now the roots are growing faster than they are being eaten.

I know that ten fish are a lot for one barrel.  But I have a few plans for the future which should help a lot.  I am excited to see how much these little guys colour up after they have had some sunlight and more live food.

If you look closely you can see some of my fish when they were new

The fish are growing larger and calmer

The plants are growing well

Shubunkin feeding time

Winter will be here before I know it, and my little fish won't be very active until the weather warms up again.  

If my little fish survive the winter they should be large enough to breed in spring.  I plan to put in a spawning mop and see what happens.  If they lay eggs on the spawning mop I will remove it and put it in another tank and try to grow out some of the fry.

For now I am just enjoying these lovely creatures and watching them grow.

FOUR MONTH UPDATE: I now pump the water through a milk bottle full of gravel.  This has increased biological filtration and provides greater aeration.  I still have ten goldfish, they all have grown a lot and their colours are beautiful.  Being winter they are moving very slow.  The plants in the floating pot of gravel have increased in size dramatically and even in mid-winter I have started to harvest the Vietnamese Coriander!

Mystery fly

A while ago I looked into a bucket of water that was in my garden and found a fly.  It looks like no other fly I have ever seen.  I once studied entomology among other things, and I tend to notice insects.  

This fly was dead, so I pulled it out of the bucket and took some photos (as you do).

It looks similar to a hover fly, but with weird white stuff and shiny parts.  The underside is kind of green.  At first I thought perhaps it was a hover fly and the white stuff was a parasite or something stuck onto the fly.  After closer inspection it appears that the white stuff is just part of the fly.

If anyone knows what this is I would love to learn more.

Mystery fly

Green underneath the fly

Green underneath

Shiny back

Maidenhair fern babies

I love maidenhair ferns, they are such graceful plants.  

I got a tiny maidenhair fern back in 2016 as an office fern, and since then it has grown huge.  The fronds are now about 50-60cm long. 

My Maidenhair fern

I also bought a variegated maidenhair fern, I didn't look after it very well so it has not grown as large.  The variegated form of Maidenhair ferns is exquisite.  

Variegated Maidenhair fern

As well as these older, well established ferns, I also have some baby maidenhair ferns.  

I transplanted a bunch into a pot in early January so they would have some room to grow, but still be in one pot so would be simple to care for.  

My timing was a mistake as it was too hot and windy on that day.  As you can see below the fronds got scorched a little.

Planted early January

 

I think that all of the tiny ferns survived, they grew and look healthy.  They are large enough to transplant into separate pots, but I think I will wait for spring before I do that. 

These ones I have grown outside under shelter rather than taking up space inside the house.  They probably need a little more light, but overall they are going ok. 

Mid April

Ready to be divided

I'm not sure what I will do with these little ones.  I plan to separate them into different pots in spring.  Maybe I will sell some, maybe I will keep all of them.  They sure are lovely little plants.

Sarracenia psittacina golf ball form

Late last winter or early spring a very generous person sent me a small plant of Sarracenia psittacina (golf ball form).  I believe he imported seeds and grew this plant from them.   

Sarracenia psittacina is a lovely looking plant, and I have read about the golf ball form.  The few pictures I had seen had large round heads on the pitchers and brilliant colouration.  The few descriptions I had read made it sound like a strong growing plant.

It is a really nice looking plant, my photos do not do it justice.  As I type this I realise that it is now quite a lot larger than it was in any of these photos, I haven't got around to take any more recent pictures.

Look so much larger once repotted

 

When it arrived, the plant was small, but looked very healthy.  It also had a seedling of what appears to be a hybrid Sarracenia tucked under it.  

I didn't want to damage either plant so I left them together to grow larger before attempting to divide them.

The plants not long after they arrived

As I planted them I snapped one of the young pitchers.  You can see it in the photo above.  Not a great start, but the plant seemed to forgive me for this and started growing pretty much straight away.

As the plants grew, the psittacina grew faster and larger than the hybrid.  It got so large that I forgot that I still had the little hybrid.  If you look closely below you can still see it in the pot.

It grew quickly

Before I knew it my plant needed a larger pot.  I kept saying to myself that I would repot it later, and I kept putting it off.  It didn't take long for the plant to be far too large for its tiny pot.

Needed repotting and dividing

It looks a bit silly having such a large plant in such a tiny pot.  It probably would have grown even faster had it been in a larger pot earlier.

This needed to go into a larger pot

It is amazing how much larger plants look once they are in a decent sized pot.  

I separated the two plants and put the hybrid in its own little pot.  The tiny hybrid still looks healthy enough.

repotted and divided

I really like Sarracenia psitticina golf ball form.  I hope I can over winter it successfully and see just how large it will grow next year.

Two harvests of honey

This year we had one large harvest of liquid honey early in the season, I also cut out some honey comb, then things went awry.  Since then things have picked up a little.

After the first harvest I left the supers on and the bees started to fill them again, they drew out some frames to replace the comb I had taken.  

Last weekend I needed to remove a super and pack my hives down a little before winter, the only sensible way for me to do that was to remove the honey and get the bees to clean things up a little, so I got a few jars of honey out of one of the supers. 

Below are jars from the each of the two harvests.  Honey from the first harvest was light in colour and thinner, while honey from the second was far darker.  The darker honey tastes far nicer, it is much thicker, and smells really floral.

I find it incredible how different the two crops of honey are.  They both came from the same hive, with the same queen, in the same location  It makes perfect sense to be different as there were different things blooming at the time, but I still find it fascinating.

New honey on left, old honey on right