>We are digging a long trench about 3 feet deep 3feet wide for the fish and
a
separation for the fingerlings. A solar pump will pump the fish water to
tubes that will soak the root balls of the plants suspended in cups held by
vertical structures and back to the fish (oxygenated and cleaned). I hope to
feed the fish worms from the composting toilet, which I also hope to build
soon.
We have done something a bit similar. We had an old above ground swimming
pool, no longer deep enough for growing family to swim in. We put water
plants in the pond and koi [Japanese carp] and diverted a roof downpipe into
the pool. Then cut an outlet hole into the side of the pool, up near the
top, fitting a PVC stormwater pipe through this hole, with a T-piece on the
end, above the pool, one end of the T up, the other down, with bathroom
floor grates over the ends of the T. If you put a pipe straight in
horizontally with a grate on the end it will choke swiftly with surface pond
weed. The outlet is fitted back to the stormwater. Local water authority
said OK.
You will need to consider whether you need some such freshening system to
deal with excess nitrogen. Your plant feeding routing may suffice. We used
the old pool pump to pump to an elevated 44 gallon pump to gravity feed the
fish water via half inch hose to garden. The problem with such a system, of
course, is finding a balance which allows subtraction of water to plants in
dry weather, without taking the pool down too far. Judgment was that if we
were in a dry spell needing tap water for plants, the water would be better
for garden use if first used to top up the pool.
Koi, being vegetarians, eat all the surface weed we put in. We made the
mistake of adding two ducks, who destroyed everything. Gambusia, mosquito
fish, arrived as eggs on pond weeds, and are now in teeming millions, and as
voracious carnivores they eliminate the prospect of any small animal life.
They will also tear fins off quite large fish. I think we will have to
remove the koi and give the pond a chlorine shock and clean out (something I
do not look forward to) to solve the gambusia question.
best wishes
Dennis
To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg". If you receive the digest format, use the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg-digest".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"subscribe sanet-mg-digest".
All messages to sanet-mg are archived at:
http://www.sare.org/htdocs/hypermail