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View Full Version : Pond and constant flow.



simonavc
22nd November 2010, 12:42
I have decidied for now to skip the earth pond experiment.

The new plan (for now anyway) is to create a large pond and grow bed
with geotextile and food safe pond liner.
The pond is to be from 5-10kl and the grow bed around
30m2 with roughly 300mm deep gravel grow beds.
The plants will be fed by constant flow via lines buried about 50mm in the grow bed and 2mm holes drilled every 300mm (one for each plant).
The grow bed itself (about 5m wide) is going to be a lined v drain with the rows of plants down the outside and a path down the middle over the 100-200mm ag pipe about 600mm deep.
I'll have 7000l/hr of flow (for starters) turning over the main pond once per hour at least.

I'll be up for roughly a thousand bucks for starters, but this should be a fair amound of veges and fish (after a year anyway) and the system would pay for itself (including power) very quickly.

Any comments appreciated.
Simon

Castaway
27th November 2010, 11:33
http://www.permaculture.org.au/images/fishpond_04.jpg

I was just reading Geoff Lawton's post on his fish pond dam that he recently constructed.
http://permaculture.org.au/2010/11/26/constructing-a-fishpond-dam/#more-4636
If you have 66 acres of hilly landscape and some creative flair you can have a terraced pond system to aerate the lower fish dam with a constant water flow through a collection of swales feeding a larger upper catchment etc. Not quite aquaponics I know, but interesting in the way a lot of these systems can be managed to look after themselves - sort of...if you have enough land. Now hook up a water wheel to the water flow and...etc etc...