If You Build It They Will Come.........

NOTE:  To those that read this post on your phone, through school, or email you may not see the pictures in the post.  To see the actual blog you need to go to:  http://www.theaquaponicsproject.blogspot.com

NOTE: I want to thank those of you new followers that have requested to be a part of my posts.  I have had many people express interest in my project and I want to thank you. For those of you that receive my email posts and do not read it often or prefer to read it at my actual blog on the Internet please let me know. I have more requests than email slots and would rather put someone in that reads the posts.  No weirdness.  Just let me know.

If You Build It They Will Come.........

Many of you reading this will recognize the above picture.  This is a clip from the movie Field of Dreams.  In the movie, Ray, played by Kevin Costner hears the voice "If You Build It They Will Come."  Some exciting things have transpired since my last post that brings to mind this famous line.  I had some goals when I started this project and although I never knew when or how they would transpire I just reminded myself to get it started and then worry about the rest later.

Small Sidetrack

I believe so may people never start.  We come up with all types of problems or roadblocks that stop us before we ever get started.  I have learned that one of the hardest parts of any project or endeavor is just starting.  

For example, my wife, two years ago, just decided to start.  She has always wanted to explore her artistic side and didn't due to all the unforeseen problems that may lie ahead.  She determined in her mind to just start and has just celebrated her 100th post, sold some of her art pieces, and just had her first "give away".  I am so proud of her.  She just decided to start.  Check her blog out.   http://sadieinspired.blogspot.com/

Back to my project:

When I got started I had no clue how my goals would come to fruition.  Therefore, I just keep moving along.

One of the goals was to bring this project to local schools for project based learning.  I showed one of our physics teachers my blog and he had a vision that was much grander than mine.

If You Build It They Will Come.........
 
One thing led to the next and tomorrow we have a preliminary meeting with two of our biology teachers, the physics teacher, and me on how we are going to build a comprehensive interdisciplinary aquaponics project at our school site that will include some of these goals;

1. eighth to twelfth grade project based study on various aspects of the aquaponics project that will be divided into biology, physics, and chemistry.
2. Research the most cost effective and energy efficient design to be used as a model for low income areas.
3. Prepare students for national scholarships and competitions.
4. Provide fresh produce to our district food services department to fund our project.

We have a great school with great teachers and I am so excited that we will be bringing aspects of this project to our school.  More to come later.....

Today's update.

I took some of the small sprouts and planted them in the 2" pots and then transferred them to the empty holes I had in the Styrofoam.  Everything is stable in my system.  I am waiting for the weather to start warming up so things will begin to take off.

The only thing I need to add to the system in Iron.  I see that some of the plants that are up are turning a bit yellow.  This is due to lack of iron.  I will find and add iron soon.

My son helping with the transplants.  Both of us in pajama pants.  Too cool!

They are dropping the 2" pots into the holes

Update / Journal entry

NOTE:  To those that read this post on your phone, through school, or email you may not see the pictures in the post.  To see the actual blog you need to go to:  http://www.theaquaponicsproject.blogspot.com

This post will be a summary of different aspects of this project

Fish

One of the fish appeared to have a "white" round spot between its eyes.  It was taken out today and quarantined spending the night in the garage.  Our fish quarantine facilities is a 5 gallon bucket with a small aquarium pump that is left in the garage.  I will observe when I have time this week.  I may need to take a biopsy scrape from its head.

Water Quality

I take readings once a week.  My readings include;

• General observations 
• Dissolved oxygen
• Temperature
• Ammonia
• Hardness
• pH
• Alkalinity
• Nitrite
• Nitrate

The concern is the high nitrite and nitrate.  This is why I am rushed to get plants in the system to take clean the water up.

New Procedure

I needed to get plants in the water now.  The nitrate is up and I need plants to utilize this and clean the water.  Therefore, I went to Home Depot and bought four plants.  A banana pepper, Anaheim chili, cayenne pepper, and bell pepper.  I carefully removed them from the pot and washed all the soil away.  I cannot plants these plants into the Styrofoam because I do not know the substrate.  If there is contaminant in the soil them this could wreak havoc on my system.  Therefore, I removed all the soil, placed the plant in one of the net pots I use and then added the coconut noir/vermiculite mixture. I then ran the roots out the bottom and placed in the system.  The two that I put in last night looked great this morning.

Seedlings

My second batch has been very successful.  I decreased the water, took the plastic covers off and moved them on the counter of the kitchen sink (my wife loves this).  No, I have not controlled for the differences.  I will do this in the future.  I just need to get these plants going.  I have had great success on the sprouts.

1st Batch:  9 Pak Choi, 1 leek, 8 Swiss Chard, 3 corriander, 4 Spinach  

2nd Batch:  tomatoes (100%), jalapenos (80%), serranos (100%) bell peppers (100%), squash (80%), cucumbers (100%), basil (75%), oregano (75%), beans (0%)

3rd batch (3/11/2012, All plants are outside.

• 7 corriander
• 2 cucumbers
• 1 squash
• 8 leeks
• 9 green onions
• 9 beans

Below are winter and or spring plants.  They will not do well in the summer.  I am planting them for practice and testing purposes. (Greenhouse cover placed on these)

• 4 romaine (test)
• 5 arugula (test)
• 4 lettuce GL (test)
• 5 lettuce bib (test)
• 7 spinach (test)

Layout

I will construct a small 2 x 4 square foot area to plant a few plants in the soil for some control.  This first go around I will not perform everything as an experiment.  I am in the testing phases.  If I feel, through my initial testings, that one procedure or method is better than the other THEN I will test it through experimentation.  The plant box will act as a semi control and for initial testing.  The reason it is not a full control is due to many factors.

I will not replicate.  A good experiment replicates and controls all other variables.  Therefore, I would need at least three of the same plants in the raft and the soil of one species.

Also, I am not controlling for the water used.  If I wanted to say that the raft system is better than the soil then I would need to use the same water to control for that.  I will not waste fish water to water my plants, as of today.
 

Out........

Fish Dissection: Male or Female?

NOTE:  To those that read this post on your phone, through school, or email you may not see the pictures in the post.  To see the actual blog you need to go to:  http://www.theaquaponicsproject.blogspot.com


You may recall that in my post, Fish Suicide, I had discussed the importance of teaching my son or daughter how to find answers instead of giving them. I asked my daughter, "Is it male or female?"  She answered "I don't know daddy tell me."  I used that opportunity to allow my daughter to "Google" it and find the answer.  After much sifting we did find pictures of the Tilapia genitalia and therefore had the resources needed for our dissection of our little tilapia.

Females have two openings (not including the anus) and males have one opening

As a former high school biology teacher I have dissected almost everything under the sun from starfish to cow eyeballs. This allows me access to borrow the tools I need and the experience to dissect the fish.

The whole set-up.  Ipad for anatomy, dissecting scope, gloves, dissecting tray, and tools

One of the things I took for granted was animal preservation.  In high school, we receive our animals for dissection in preservatives so as to keep all the anatomical features intact.  When our fish was found dead next to our outside tank, we should have dissected it right then.  Instead, I put it into the freezer and found out that this is definitely not the way to preserve.  My specialty in college was entomology (the study of insects) and our easy way to preserve for pinning the insects was to put them into the freezer.  This is not the way to preserve our fish. Therefore when we finally got around to opening our fish it was nothing but mush.  No swim bladder, intestines, heart, liver, or stomach. Bummer. We will need another sacrifice in the future to continue our internal anatomy lesson.

We did go through the external anatomy which included all the dorsal, caudal, anal, pelvic, and pectorial fins.  We also looked at the eyes, mouth, operculum (gill cover), lateral line and then looked at the scales and gills under the microscope.

Of course, we started with the question, male or female?  After looking at the comparisons of our picture reference and the actual anatomy of our little fish my daughter determined that the fish was male. 

My daughter looking at a picture of male and female Tilapia

My daughter determining the sex of the fish.

Cut number one.

I think her face expression says it all.  Remember the inside was gushy mushy. 

Budding young scientist with ipad.

Our adventure continues......

Failure...

This is a continuation of my last post.  I had eluded to the fact that I wanted to discuss FAILURE.

I refuse to write a dissertation within this post so I will attempt to be brief.  Failure is so misunderstood in my experience.  It seems sometimes that we, in education or life, tend to have a distorted view of failing.  Failing is the one of the greatest things we can do.  It is the path to success.  How can you understand success without failure? 

I have used the example of learning to ride a bike to describe failing.  What if we were afraid to fail or stopped when we failed?  We would never have learned to ride a bike?  Failure is necessary.

So, in regards to this project.  We look forward to the failures that lie ahead.  Those hiccups will allow us to ask better questions and start new paths of discovery.  I am thankful that my plants died the first go around.  After a bit of research my plants suffered from "damping off."  A common fungus problem with new seedlings.  We have a new seedling approach and now know what to look for. My daughter will understand through this project that failure is necessary but it is how we respond to that failure that defines us. 

For those of you who do not see the pictures I will quote.  It is the last scene from Meet the Robinsons.  

"Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long.

We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious... 

and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."

Walt Disney

Sprouting Chronicles....

One important aspect of this project is to prepare and design a small working model that can be scaled up for mass production.  Therefore, every aspect of this project has to be efficient and as low cost as possible.  In order to have a constant supply of fresh vegetables there needs to be different stages of plant and fish development.  On the plant side there needs to be seeds sprouting, plants ready to be transplanted, plants in the rafts, and plants being harvested. 

While thinking about the above aspects I attempted to use two different medias for plants production.  As you recall in the previous post I used a media  of coconut noir/vermiculite (CV) and a media or Rockwool (RW).  Failure (I will comment on failure in my next post).  My plants did not grow well.  The CV media had a 75% germination rate and my RW media had about 12% germination rate.  Only one species, the leeks, sprouted in the RW media.  Of the plants that did sprout they did not take well to their environment.  I will comment on what I think happened in my next post.

 

Therefore, I took most of the plants out and started over.  I did take the opportunity to use the transplanted plants and put them in the system to test the procedure for drilling holes in the rafts and placing them in them.

I need to test, as stated above, how to efficiently plant and transplant to the system.  The seedlings are starting off in a tray with 92 slots.  The idea is to transplant the mature sprouts to 2" or 3" pots to go into the rafts.  Below you see some premature transplanted plants placed into 2" pots to be placed into the raft. 

The spring season is underway and I have no plants so I concentrated on planting summer plants in the above trays.  I do have some spring plants but mostly summer now.

tomatoes
serrano chilis
green bell peppers
jalapenos
squash
cucumbers
pak choi (spring)
leeks (spring)
cilantro
oregano
beans
onions

 I then cut holes needed in the Styrofoam.  It was fairly simple and will not take much time to finish the others.  Different plants need different spacing.  This is a small plant raft.

Here is the raft in the water with the premature plants inside.  I expect the plants to die and will discuss this in the next post.  For now I have gone through the initial process from seeds to raft. I look forward to a higher success rate with the plants on the next run. For now out...............

Fish Suicide

As I was walking to the side of the house to take my weekly readings I noticed that one of my fish was on the ground.  Dead.  Unbelievable.  I have a cover over the tank for a few reasons and that is one of them.  The opening between the cover and the tank is so small.  I don't understand how that he got out.  Friendly Aquaponics state in their manual that this can happen.  Tilapia explore and will jump out if there is no cover.  I took this opportunity to replace the material I used on my cover.

Other than that mishap everything with the tank and trough are doing very well.  The water is ready for plants.  The ammonia reading is low, the nitrite is dropping, and the nitrate is high.  This is our plant food.  I will explain more about the progress of the plants in the next post.

Last note:  Our fish death will not be wasted.  The fish sacrificed himself for education.  Let me explain.

I had stated that one of the goals of this project was to provide schools with a working aquaponics system that is a project based, hands-on approach to learning.  The aquaponics project involves all of the core disciplines and other elective curricula.  Disciplines include;

SCIENCE

• Physics (Engineering) ---- trough and tank design
• Chemistry - water
• Biology (zoology (ichthyology, entomology, botany, horticulture, aquaculture, microbiology,...)) -- fish, plants, bacteria

MATH

• Geometry - trough and tank design
• Algebra - trough and tank design

 LANGUAGE ARTS

• English --- research, writing technical reports, design instructions

SOCIAL SCIENCE

• History --- History of aquaculture, traditional farming methods, hydroponics, etc...
• Social Projects --- Food and Rescue Mission

Now back to the fish that will be used for education....  My daughter, son, and I will be dissecting an examining everything we need to know about tilapia anatomy just as would be the case at any school.  We will be looking at everything; eyes, scales, digestive tract, sexual organs, fins, heart, etc.  Our fish is in the freezer waiting for our dissecting scope to be brought out and utilized.  I asked my daughter a question today.  How do I know if the fish is a male or female?  She looked at me inquisitively and responded how most kids do, "I don't know daddy tell me."  What an opportunity for me!  Do you think I told her the answer? 

No.

I am training my daughter to be a critical thinker.  She has to find the answer.  Once she knew I was not going to tell her I then began asking leading questions to help guide her towards the answer.  She wonderfully commented on how her and her brothers private parts were different and therefore maybe the female fish and male fish have different private parts.

So the journey begins....  How fortunate I am to be able to guide her on her educational quest which ultimately reveals more and more about how wonderful God is.

I believe education can be looked at two ways;

1. To know more about a particular subject ... or 
2. To know more about a particular subject which reveals more about who God is and what He did for us.

I choose the latter......

Indoor Planning and Planting

Today was a good day for many reasons but mainly because it was my eight year anniversary.  I love my wife.  I am so lucky.  Thank you Jen for the amazing eight years and the many more to come.  We were able to go down to Santa Monica over the weekend and eat at RFD (vegan restaurant.. good food!!), see Cirque Du Soleil OVO, and then hit Barnes and Noble.  What a night! 

I did have some time, while hanging with the kiddos to tackle another aspect of my project, the indoor planting of spring seeds.  The hardest issue is deciding on this first time around what to plant, how many to plant, and how many different variations for scientific purposes.  This will drive me to the looney bin so I decided to just get things going.  The plan is to get spring plants going that will not do well in the sun. 

The tank and trough are ready to go the only concern is frost.  Where I live we should be clear at the beginning of March so now is the time to plant.

I decided to go with two different medias for my seed trays which will eventually be transplanted into 2-3" net pots.

Media 1:  Coconut Noir (coconut fiber) with 50% Vermiculite.  This is the mixture that was recommended by Friendly Aquaponics in their manual.  I do not like the consistency of the substrate.  It is too fine.  I am afraid much of it will end up in the water.  We will soon see.

Media 2:  Rockwool:  I found this at our local Hydroponics shop.  Rockwool is a growing media that is made of rock and sand, is inexpensive, and has the consistency of cotton candy. 

I planted eight plant total for each vegetable.  Four in media 1 and four in media 2.

The plants I am starting with are as follows;

Romaine Lettuce
Bib Lettuce
Great Lakes Lettuce
Arugula
Spinach
Pak Choi
Leeks
Green Onions
Broccoli
Corriander
Swiss Chard

Mini Greenhouse trays, Vermiculite, Coconut Noir Block, Vegetables, Rockwool, Square Foot Gardening Manual

Coconut Noir in water

My daughter mixing the Coconut Noir and Vermiculite

Half Media 1 half Media 2

Off Season Planning

Short post.  The fish are adapting well and have doubled in size since the last post.  My wife has taken on the duties of feeding the fish daily.  The water quality has been ok.  The only issue seemed to be the turbidity of the tank.  I believe this was due to rainwater dripping into the tank from the roof.  I recycled water through it from the trough and the water is clear again.  I will monitor this to see if this was the problem.  There are a few projects that I will be working on next to prepare for the first planting.

I am planning my spring and summer garden layout and what I will be planting.  This will be a first test run of the project and so I will be planting a variety to see what grows well and what does not.  I need to get net pots, coconut coir and vermiculite for the planting medium, seeds, and another air pump.  Also, I will need to cut holes into the Styrofoam for the net pots. 

Until next time.....

The Fish Are In!!!

This morning we woke up with grand plans.  Get the fish...  My wife, daughter, son, and mother-in-law, took a trip to the operation facilities of Blue Beyond Fisheries in Palm Desert, CA in hopes of obtaining our Tilapia fish.  Blue Beyond Fisheries raises mostly strains of the red and gray Oreochromis mossambicus. 

Here is my daughter giving us her fish pose before we go.

Here we are at a gate in Palm Desert hoping this is the farm???

 All of those little dots in the tank are Tilapia fingerlings.

My son checking out one of the many holding tanks.

Observing one of the breeding tanks.

At home.  Fish need to acclimate to the new tank first.

My daughter taking her scientific recording duties very seriously.

Recording the number and size of each fish.

 My daughter's data sheet with number and length of each fish.  :)

Final Notes:  

Water Temperature:  78.5 degrees F.

Dissolved Oxygen:  1.75 mg/l

Time: 4:30pm

Pump.  The pump from the grow bed is turned off so I do not have to heat up that water also.  I will turn this on once I get the temperature to a level I know it can sustain.  Then I will turn on the full system again.

Observation: Fish appeared to take to the tank very well.  We will see tomorrow.