Nutrient supplied to plants in Aquaponics are from the fishes and the fish food dissolved. These sources of nutrient lack Iron, in Aquaponics Iron deficiencies result in yellowing of leaves.
There are commercial products that address this and there also some methods that are practice of old.
Chelated Iron is one common commercial product use, it is added to water via grow beds every about 2 ~ 3 weeks or so, this will cure plants of the Yellowing Leaves symptoms.
Blood meal also a source of Iron can be added to provide Iron to plants.
Old Farmers practice rusty nails and scrap metals in a bucket of water, and pouring it near tree trunk that have yellowing leaves interest me.
Does it work, those old timer may not heard of Chelated Iron, but they sure do have a lot of nails and scraps.
To practice what those farmers did, I collected scrap iron from around my back yard and put it in the tank.
At first I put it in the filter, but recently I found some long iron rod, those that for construction work they are too long for the filter so I use PVC water pipe to hold them.
What’s needed is a PVC pipes big and long enough for the job and 2 end caps. Drill holes along the pipe and place iron rod inside, capped the pipe and throw it in.
You can attach a string to it for easy retrieval or just without.
Photo shows the PVC pipe and Iron inside and this one with it in the water.
Quickie updates, after routing all water to grow beds via filter and using a more powerful pump show sign of more solids collected.
Collected fish solids and food pallets after 6 hours of pump operation.
It should be more after 1 week, as compare to yesterday's post.
Drained prefilter this evening, there are sign of fish waste in the water. So the filter work, as I said it will not be as efficient as filter using mesh, sponge or other medium.
This filter do not have anything inside, just solid and water separation using tube arrangement.
Its not much of sludge after about 1 week of running, this filter is only for one of the grow bed, so not 100 percent of water flow through it.
Above picture shows amount of collected sludge, something is better then nothing. Must figure out how to increase this waste extraction.
I have just rework my Aquaponics water feed, now 100 percent of water to both the beds are routed via filter. I use that Resun Penguin 4500 pump for water feed, and looks like two Bell valve works with 110 Watt water pump.
I cheated a bit, pump outlet were step down from 20mm to 15mm fed to filter then divide by 2, one for each bed. With full flow 20mm outlet it may be too much for 2 Bell Valve to handle, but I never tried it so can't confirm otherwise.
One thing good about Aquaponics is, I can do gardening till 10 pm.. :)
