Well Trish and Dave I have never heard of "hugelkultur". I plan to do some research and I will know by sundown. lol We are new to this site. My husband and I are in our first 10 months of sustaining our DIY Aquaponics system. We love it. We learn something new every day. We are retired so babysitting catfish and plants keeps us out of the bingo parlour. We plan to grow all year round. Of course, in Oklahoma you just never know about the weather. We can go from one extreme to the other in hours. The old saying in Oklahoma is "if you do not like the weather in Oklahoma, just hang around an hour or so cause it will change" Ronald and Sharon Love Dunlap, Old Green Shed

to ATP! We love our aquaponics system. It grows such excellent greens for us in the winter months.

If you haven't seen this article about hugelkultur, I think you'll like it:

http://garden.org/ideas/view/d...

Wow. I am so glad to meet ya'll Dave. We are in Oklahoma, Okies born and breed. Ron and I have built this system and a greenhouse. We are far from finished and only 1/2 of the greenhouse is useable. This is our baby "Old Green Shed". We have been lucky with our fish and plants. I have about 15 pink and red tomatoes right now, 4 or 5 green peppers, Chinese cabbage ready to pick. Pork steak and salad tonight. Love, love, love it.

If you do not mind may I ask a question, our PH is great, ammonia 0, nitrites 0 but those nitrates are off the chart 160 ppm.
We have a bio filter, sump tank, 2 grow beds and one floating raft bed. We even cloned some of this stuff!!! We have had bugs, not sure what they are, but they are doing their best to take over everything. We can handle all that, but these nitrates worry me to death. We took off our 49 goldfish, we raised from little bitty guys. We are going to make catfish food with them. We have about about 39 catfish, they are getting big. We run about 414 gallons total for it all.

Thanks for listening to me whine and if you can give in suggestions or web sites let me know. We raise grandkids so we do not get on the computer much. You can text us and say get on on ATP site. lol have a great one and please stay in touch

Ronald and Sharon Love Dunlap
"Old Green Shed"
pic out of focus and TOO large.


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Hi Ronald and Sharon,

It sounds like you've got a nice setup there, and that it's working the way it should. The 0 nitrites is perfect, and the high nitrates value probably means you need more plant material to use the nitrates.

You mentioned the bugs and I'm wondering if the plants aren't large and vigorous enough to be using up all the nitrates. I like to grow a wide variety of things in my grow beds so that if I lose one kind of plant, the others are still there. So I guess my question is: how healthy are the plants?