Hello, steemians, and welcome to my greenhouse, eh!
I decided to try growing a few strawberry plants with aquaculture to see how well that will work, I haven't tried this before. I had to set up a second growing bed for the plants, I didn't want to put them in the same bed as the cherry tomato plant. The tomato plant will fill the bed with roots at some point, and I want the strawberries to have room to grow. I have 3 of these containers that I've used in the past in my various aquaculture experiments, so I just had to prepare a second one to use. I had to plug the old fill and drain holes that had proved to be in the wrong place, and put new ones in for the fill and drain connectors. Because of the positions of the connectors, I had to use a couple of wood strips to set the grow bed on so it would sit flat.
I'm also trying a new way of setting up the fill and drain connectors so that the clay ball growing media doesn't sit right up against the screens. I found in the past that it's really difficult to clean the roots out of the drain if the clay balls are covering the screen, you have to remove enough of the media to be able to pull the screen out without the media falling into the drain and plugging it up. Getting the media back out of the drain is really a pain in the butt.
What I decided to try this year is using a couple of net cups to keep the media away from the fill and drain screens.
From there, it was just a matter of putting the clay ball growing media in the grow bed and putting the plant pots into the growing media. I use coconut coir pots for the plants, they hold the dirt that the plants are started in, and the roots will grow through the bottom of the pots into the growing media. I set the pots into the growing media just deep enough that the bottom of the pot is in the water, that seems to work the best for my method.
Here you can see the water draining out of the growing beds back into the fish tank.
I decided to cover the top of the net cups to keep stuff from falling into the water, and also to slow down algae growth around the fill and drain areas. I used a couple of lids from plastic coffee jugs, I had been saving the lids to use as saucers for plant pots in the greenhouse, so I had them handy.
It will be interesting to see how the strawberries do in this setup. If it works well, I'll probably do a lot more plants this way in the future. These strawberry plants are "Ozark Beauty" ever bearing plants, it makes more sense to grow the ever bearing plants in the greenhouse rather than the June bearing plants, you don't get as many berries at one time, but you get them all summer.
Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
Thanks for stopping by my page and checking out my post, eh!
As always, feel free to leave a comment or a question if you would like.
May the Steem Force be with you!