Barley Straw

In about mid-May this year our pond water was amazing! The dust settled and you could see all the fish clear as day. As a matter of fact, it looked so good that Rob had to take a break from yard work to do a cannonball smack in the middle of the pond! I was surprised he didn't swoosh any of the fish out with the massive wave he made! It was pretty awesome. Well, as the days got hotter and July came around our pond water developed a not-so-inviting green tint to it. It was starting to look a little swampy. This really bummed me out!

We looked into investing a sand filter, but we want to be able to use the water for feeding our plants, and filtering it would make it less nutritious (to tell you the truth, that is just an assumption. We didn't really do our homework on that theory). Also, a filter would be a lot of maintenance. It would have to be cleaned weekly. We would like the pond to be as close to a natural system as possible. 

We constantly pump the pond water via submersible pump into the planter box.  The box floods and the water runs through the lava rocks (we used this as a growing media). The rocks catch particles from the water as it flows through. Then the water flows over into the header pond, which is also filled with lava rock. We have parrot feather in there, which spreads really well. Some other plant life has found its way in there on its own as well. This all acts a filtration system. From the header pond the water flows into the pond. All this natural filtration is great, but the pond is still greenish!

After doing some research we found out that barley straw is great for clearing up a pond. This was great news considering we can buy it for $4 a bale. We just went on craigslist and did a local search. We found a farm that was selling it about an hour away. 

Rob made little bundles of the straw and tied it to a piece of bamboo about one foot long. The bamboo made the straw bundles float. If the straw sinks to the bottom and decays it will do no good. We put two bundles in the pond. As the straw decays it releases enzymes and humic acid into the water, which will prevent the growth of algae while being harmless to plants and fish. 

It's been just 2 days since we put the bundles in the pond. It will take a few weeks for the straw to start to decay. When you can see the straw has really decayed and broken down after a few months, then it is time to replace the straw. I really hope this works and our pond is back to cannonball status soon! I will keep you posted :)

Summer Progress!!

Hi everyone! I hope you are all having a great summer and keeping cool in this scorching heat. The pond is really starting to evolve into something beautiful. The fish are still thriving and happy as far as we can see. I'm hoping this means that our illusive catfish friend hasn't made them sick after all (we still haven't seen him!!). The Koi are getting bigger and the feeders have grown quite a bit also. I wanted to share a few photos of our summer progress around the farm.

We pulled back the plastic liner and dug out a shelf about 2 inches below the water line. We stacked rocks on the shelf and up the pond wall. This is super tedious, but it's starting to look really amazing. The rocks will make a great home to all kinds of wildlife as well. At night we can hear frogs croaking by the pond. I love that.

This is a picture of the upper bog pond that flows down into the big pond. We did the same with the rocks here. The vegetation is really starting to fill in. There are some lily pads to the left that are hard to see in this picture. There is also some parrot feather, which spreads really well. Those are planted directly in the water. I can't wait to add some cone flower, black-eyed Susan, and maybe some more herbs around the edge!

Here is a shot of my favorite Koi. He is so vibrant that when the sun shines on him through the water there is a glowing halo around him. It's hard to get a shot of him poking out of the water, but I'll keep trying. The water plants have multiplied a lot since we put them in. The plant in this picture is water hyacinth. The fish like munching on their roots.

The tilapia are getting big! We figured out that we weren't feeding them enough and that's why it was taking them so long to grow. We feed them three or four times a day now. We feed them fish flakes and Purina AquaMax Fry Starter 100*. We tried to feed them nematodes, but they weren't eating them. I can't say I blame them! The nematodes are supposed to be great for the newborn fry, so we'll try them out on them once they start reproducing. Right now we're trying to figure out the next step for the tilapia. If we put them into the pond they will most likely over- populate. Maybe the answer to that is to have a predator fish or two. But, then the goldfish might get eaten. Or maybe none of the baby tilapia would survive. We also thought about setting up a separate tank system outside and not putting them in the pond at all. It would have to either be filtered by something like a sand filter or be filtered naturally by an aquaponics system. I have a feeling we're going to need more yard :) thanks for reading!!


* AquaMax™ Fry Starter 1001/320.8 mmCrumble - Sink50.17.3

Tilapia Farming

One of our goals for our aquaponics/aquaculture system is tilapia farming. We chose tilapia for a few different reasons. They are super tolerant fish, they reproduce like crazy, and their poop is great for fertilizing plants. If we get good enough at maintaining the systems properly we are hoping to be able to make this a profitable venture by selling the fry (tilapia babies). Not to mention, we will have fresh organic fish as much as we can possibly eat. As a matter of fact, we will have so much fish will have to find a market for it or else our system will over crowd, and fast! I'm thinking backyard fish fry! Any excuse for a party :)


To start the farming process we went to www.tilapiasource.com  and ordered 50 pure blue strain tilapia (Oreochromis Aureus). They shipped overnight. I think it's amazing that you can hop on your computer, order 50 live fish, and have them at your doorstep the next day! And, they came from White Brook Tilapia Farm out of Kansas City, Missouri; that's a trip. Our little fishies arrive in a plastic bag filled with water and tied in a knot. The plastic bag was inside a styrofoam cooler. All the little guys shipped successfully, no floaters! The fry were way smaller than we expected them to be. There were a few of them who looked like they were all eyes with tiny little fins you could hardly see. We wanted the fry to get bigger before putting them into the pond, so we bought a 10 gallon tank from Walmart to get them started in.

We learned that tilapia are very messy. They poop A LOT! That's pretty much all they do; that and reproduce. We couldn't keep the tank water clean no matter how hard we tried. Rob's dad bought us a really good filter for it, but still the filter needed to be changed every couple of days. We looked on craigslist for a good deal on a bigger aquarium. We found a 55 gallon tank with gravel, statues, filter, filter pads, air-pump, and lights all for $70! That was an amazing bargain.

The picture above is the 10 gallon tank from Walmart. Pretty gross, huh? The picture below is the new and improved fry home. Those little guys are really going to grow now!

A few facts about tilapia

• Tilapia are the fifth most consumed fish in the U.S. 
• They are remarkably "un-fishy" and typically take on the flavor of whatever sauce they are cooked in.
• Environmentalists encourage eating tilapia because they are so eco-friendly.
• Oceans Alive ranks U.S. farmed tilapia as an "eco-best" choice, meaning they don’t damage the environment (through pollution of waters, reduction of biodiversity, overharvesting, etc.). So does National Geographic's Green Guide.
• Pond raised tilapia are a toxin-free food. Co-Op America places them on their "safe" list.
• Tilapia inhibit a variety of habitats including fresh water streams, ponds, rivers and lakes. 

Catfish!?

So, one night while hanging out in the backyard with our neighbor (who has an AMAZING urban farm) we were telling him how we wanted to get a catfish to put into the pond. Our thoughts were that the catfish would help keep the pond clean by eating some of the algae and muck that accumulates. So, just the other day our friendly neighbor pops his head over the fence and excitedly tells me that we are the proud owners of a catfish. He caught it on his fishing trip that day and threw it in our pond. I'm pretty sure it came out of Lake Norman. At first I was super excited about this. Then, I thought I better do a little research on it. Should have done that BEFORE asking for the little guy!

Like I said, this is a learning experience-a science project. I started googling wild catfish in a koi pond. The results I found were mostly not good. I found that you shouldn't add wild caught fish into a habitat with pet store fish because of the chance of adding harmful things like parasites, which the wild fish may be carrying. I kinda freaked out about this because I have really come to love the koi we have. To remove the harmful parasites, if there are any in there now, we would have to drain the pond, clean it, treat it, then refill it! That would be terrible! Not to mention all of our fish would probably die.  Since the catfish is already in the pond we are going to take our chances and see what happens. There is also the chance that he could eat some of the goldfish, but the koi are too big for him to eat, thankfully.

It's been about a week since the catfish was added (I haven't even seen him yet) and the goldfish and koi seem perfectly fine still. They are eating and swimming as normal. If all works out and our fish stay in good health I hope to train that illusive catfish to come to the surface and eat from our hands. That would be really cool. I will keep you all updated on that situation.

The next step for Project Pond is to find a good sand filter. The water is starting to get a bit green from algae and it will most likely get worse through the summer. The sand filter along with the plants, stone and sand in the header pond and planter should be enough to keep the water nice and clear, but we've been wrong before :)

The start of a HUGE project!

PROJECT URBAN FARM

 We are making this blog to document the progress of our backyard urban farm project. We are learning all about aquaponics,  fish farming and creating our own little backyard farm. We believe that becoming as self-sufficient as possible is very important, especially in times like these. Our goal is to make our land work and produce for us. We have about a half-acre plot of land just 4 miles from the center of downtown Charlotte, NC. I call this adventure "Project Urban Farm". With this blog we hope to inspire people to make the most of their land even if it's a small apartment balcony.

This whole big idea began when Rob's dad gifted us some heavy equipment rentals so that we could fix up our back yard. Behind our little home was a half acre of land speckled with left-over gravel from a driveway long ago, tree roots emerging from the ground, and little patches of weeds, I mean, grass. So by the picture this description forms in your mind you can see this was no back yard get away!

Bring on the heavy equipment! The plan was to scrape the yard to get it ready for planting new grass, and to level a spot off the back porch so that we could put in a patio. Then, I watch this show that featured a family who turned their in-ground swimming pool into a tilapia pond and full on aquaponics system. I wanted one!! Since we didn't  have a swimming pool, but we did have the heavy equipment I thought...dig a pond! So that is exactly what we did, because happy wife equals happy life :)

Rob and his dad had so much fun on those big 'toys'. They worked all weekend scraping, leveling, and digging. The hole they dug for the pond was WAY bigger than I was expecting it to be, but I loved it! The next step for the pond was to line it. We bought an EPDM product called Pond Guard made by DuPont. To be extra safe we also bought a non-woven fabric to put under the EPDM liner. The pond is about 4000 gallons, so for this size pond we spent about $350 on the EPDM and about $60 on the non-woven fabric. We had to lay the liners as flat as we could so that there weren't many folds and wrinkles for the future inhabitants to get stuck in. That was kind of a pain and definitely took some patience. Once that was done we put some large stones down on the liner to hold it in place. Then we filled the pond with the garden hose. Hello water bill! We let the water sit for a few days before putting fish in it. This gave the chlorine time to evaporate out of the water first. At this point the pond is still a good ways from finished, but we wanted to get the biology of the pond going so we put fish in it as soon as the water was free of chlorine.

Picking out the fish was a lot of fun! Our oldest son loved helping us carefully pick some really beautiful little gold fish. We bought about 50 fish total. Most were little feeder fish. Some were comet fish, and we picked 3 amazingly vibrant koi. We brought them to their new home in our back yard and voila! Our pond came alive! A lot of the feeder fish died just because they are shipped to the pet store in boxes that  are packed so tightly  they can hardly move. Because of this they arrive to the pet store sick. The pet store will treat their water and bring them back to health somewhat, but some of them don't make it. That's why they are feeder fish, meant to be dinner to some other larger fish. With that all said, we were scooping floaters out of our pond for days. I thought there was something wrong with the water or something. After all the weak fish died off, we were left with the strong ones. Now they are getting pretty big, especially the koi.

The edges of the pond are still unfinished. We are adding to it little by little. It's like a sculpture we are free styling piece by piece.


Water is pumped from the pond and into the very top header pond. We have various plants growing in there. Some plants are doing really well there, and some are not. It's like a giant science experiment, we're learning as we go. The floating plants are water lettuce and water hyacinth. They are both doing really well! They are supposed to help keep the algae at bay. The idea is for the plants to filter the pond water and the fish poop to fertilize the plants.




This is a better view of the planter box and the header bog. The growing medium inside the planter box is lava rock. We have things like tomatoes, water lilies,green onions, water iris,

celery, leeks, various mosses, mint, and spicy basil growing in the planter. The onions, leeks, and celery are all just the bottoms of the store bought plant after we used it. They are all producing lots of seeds for future planting :) We have a lot of work ahead, but it's been a lot of fun so far. I'm excited to keep everyone posted on the progress!