Tomato and Sweet Banana Pepper Blossoms

 My tomato and sweet banana pepper are blooming! I purchased these plants from Lowe's Garden Center.  They have a good selection and their plants look healthy. Keep the green growing!

 Sweet Banana Pepper

Tomato Flowers!

These buds should be growing into tomatoes!

Root Rot

Well, the Jalapeno and Red bell have had root rot.  My Jalapeno died because I didn't know what was wrong with it until my Red bell started doing the same thing.  The leaves get super soft and droopy, and the roots are brown and soft.  I pulled all the brown roots off of  the Red bell hopefully that was what I was supposed to do.  There were only a few short white roots left, thicker than all the brown hair roots but still not enough to support itself at its current sized.  

When transferring plants from soil, CLEAN the roots completely, especially on the peppers.  Also, spread the roots apart don't just dig a hole in your grow medium and plop it in.  If there are chunks of soil and/or the roots are just in a ball, they will not dry enough between water cycles; the plant will drown.

Garden Pool in Mesa, Arizona

Garden Pool is a non profit organization in the McClung's family backyard.  They bought a house and the pool was empty and they did not want to fix it so they decided to turn it into a large green house with a pond in the deep end. They give classes on many different topics such as: what to grow, how to grow it, how to harvest, what works, what doesn't.  They are also making efforts to teach community members how to grow their own food! Here are some pictures of my duckweed and string algae production.

                                Trying to get some string algae to grow to feed the Tilapia

                                I propped the shade cloth up to get some breeze flowing through
                                and to shade the walls from the sun.  The're acting like a furnace
                                radiating heat.

                                My grow media cubic feet bio filter to gallons of water is: 10 cubic
                                feet of grow media to about 85 gallons of water(25-30 gallon
                                sump/grow bed plus 55 gallon fish tank)
                                7.48 gallons = 1 cubic foot
                                85 gallons needs to have a minimum of 11.36 cubic feet. This is a 1:1 ratio.
                                If we say that I only need to filter the fish tank water of 55 gallons then,
                                55 gal to 7.35 cubic feet
                             

Welcome to My Aquaponics in the Phoenix Area

Let me introduce myself a bit.  My name is Ryan and I live in Mesa, Arizona.  I married my beautiful wife Caitlin about 9 months ago. We both go to work full-time, I work at a manufacturing company in Tempe and Caitlin just started working at an automotive care center, today was her first day.
 I planted an Oregano, Red Bell, Tomato, Green Onion and Greek Basil  about two weeks ago and yesterday I put twenty-seven feeder minnows in. I currently have five plants and two fish, yes two fish from the original twenty-seven. For those of you that do not live in a HOT climate, I envy you. I went to my local aquarium store today to test my water for the fish, for free btw, the test results showed that the water was perfectly fine.  I bought a floating thermometer and dropped it in the fish tank when i got home.  The water was at 98 degrees. Now, that is a little bit too much on the warm side for any fish. I spent this afternoon searching for ideas on how to cool the water down.  I could buy a water cooler for $300, ha, someone else suggested on yahoo answers to freeze water in bottles and float them in the water, I decided to give that a try.  The water melted pretty quickly and the water temp came down to about 96 degrees, yippie!  My observation is the temperature dropped because it was getting later in the day. Tomorrow I'll see if the little minnows are still swimming right side up.
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Red Bell (Was planted too deep and all the leafs popped off)

Tomato (Got a little crispy, now I think it just needs more nutrients)

Onion pulled from my in-laws dried up garden.

Oregano dried up (Tastes amazing though)