Starting Over

We ran our system for 5 years before the snail invasion .

The fish did not seem to eat many of the snails.

 This week we shut down

the vegetable troughs  and kept the fish on standby. 

We emptied the water from the vegetable troughs , cleaned out the sludge at the bottom , bleached the troughs,

washed the rafts , let everything sun dry , washed out again  and refilled with clean water.

We let the water sit for two days to burn off any chlorine  before  hooking everything up to the fish tanks.

Pumps are on and  water is flowing . 

Today we plant new sets.

To prevent a new invasion of snails , slugs etc we bought 50 pounds of diatomaceous 

earth and spread it on the ground around the plant troughs. 

Hopefully we  are good to go for another 5 years.

Big Island Spring Cleaning

After 5 years of aquaponic activity we needed to cleanup the system.
Slugs  are always a problem and we had been keeping them under control .
This year however we let a child help us with the system and she put a snail
into it.  Then we had hundreds of little water snails. At first I tried to just catch them
and kill them. After a month or so that was not working and the snails were really multiplying.

The cure ?  Clean out the whole system and start over ?  Maybe . I am not sure but we are trying to control them naturally before we go that route.

We cleared out the vegetables and put fish into the vegetable troughs. We are not feeding those fish
and we hope they will kill and eat all the snails and slugs too.

I'll let you know in a few weeks if it works.