When it Rains it Pours

It is going to happen, no matter where your survival garden is located, it is going to rain one day.

Rain can mess with your pH and increase the water levels. If you are on a flood and drain set up, you should plan for this.

Look what happened after it rained one day.


The water got cloudy.  Even though the fish we were using as test subjects were just feeder goldfish, we felt sorry for them and exchanged some of the water.  If you do this in an attempt to stabilize the pH without chemical intervention, don't swap out more than 1/3 of the water because you don't want to loose too many of the fish poo nutrients from the water.

The big lesson learned here is to have an overflow mechanism so that if the water level raises too high, it automatically drains out of the system.  No matter where your survival garden is located, this is just a good practice.

And speaking of practice, look how we'll our practice green onions are going.  You will notice that we added rosemary to the bed as a test to. See how plants that normally like to be dry will respond to an aquaponics system.

Growing Media

There are a couple of ways to set up your grow beds.  We started with a flood and drain system.  In this method the water from the fish tank cycles from the tank to the grow bed where it floods the bed and then drains back into the tank.

Using this method we started with regular pea gravel from the garden center.  The gravel is perfect because it won't absorb or hold water and has so many little crevices, nooks, and crannies between each pebble that roots can easily spread.  Because the gravel. Is dirty, we put it in buckets and rinsed it with a garden hose to remove the dirt.

The lesson learned is that gravel makes a great grow media, but even when you think it is clean...it is not.  We put the gravel in the grow bed and waited for the first flood and drain cycle to see if we had the water level correct.  The water level was correct but the gravel wasn't as clean as we thought.  The dirt fouled the water so bad that the first set of fish pretty much died within 24 hours.  The survivors were temporarily released into the pond in the front yard.  Good thing that we conducted the test with feeder goldfish!

Lessons learned.  Gravel is a great grow media.  Gravel must be thoroughly washed until all the water runs clean.  Always conduct tests with feeder goldfish.

Oh, by the way...some pepper plants and a green onion are the test plants to see how different root systems interact with gravel as a grow media.  They are loving it!