aquaponics system update week 15

Hello steemit this week I bring you black gold. @amy-goodrich alerted me to the possibility of phytoftora on my tomatoes. So I am interested to see if using trichoderma spp. will do anything to halt further spreading of the disease. 8've started to weigh my food input because nitrates are all over the place and bugs stole my strawberry, grrrr.

Pictured is a mix of trichoderma and some bacillus species that are used by comercial growers and there is evidence to support it's use in a variety of cases. It's usually used against rootrot and not commonly used in aquaponics as I explained previously. I used one gram for a spray bottle of 750 ml and plan to use this once a week, spraying it on te leaves and dumping the rest in the growbeds water.
I used it on some of the strawberry roots and of the leaves of the tomatoes and pepper plant.

strawberry roots today	hoping to stop the march of this sickness

Nutes in ppm

This week I added a bit of KOH (<100 ml 25% solution) to maintain ph levels and iron and manganese as micronutrients. No major drops in the other nutrients. I'm starting to weigh the food because nitrates keep jumping all over the place. Today I gave 112 gr of feed to my 34 trout. For reference the uvi system had a mean of 90 grams of feed per square meter. I have 2 square meters of growing bed.

Element	My values	Typical hydroponic solution
N	30	210
P	18	31
K	45	235
Ca	120-140	200
Mg	30	48
Fe	1	1 to 5
Cu	0	0.05
NO2	0.2	0

Harvesting bugs

Just when that strawberry you have been waiting for ripens bugs strike. I didn't have these eating my berries in june. I think I raised these bugs on turnips I had nearby in the soil. Previously I got lucky with the aphids because my system atracted enough ladybugs. No such luck with these bugs.

strawberry infested with bugs	bug infested ground turnip, bug hub?

All of my turnips were infected with various things, I had one seedling transplanted to my growbed to see if it grows. The skin appeared better but cutting it open revealed the same bugs.

aquaponics turnip	sliced in two

Peas still going strong!

The sweet grey dwarf variety only gave me one harvest but this Mrs. Lei variety keeps on giving, they ran out of growing space and doubled over my growbed hanging there.

Looking out for

I planted some Physalis peruviana, we will see if these can beat the frost.

peppers looking good

See you next time, feel free to ask questions