My son is trying to make a small hydroponic system for school and we were wondering about making our own solution from chicken manure and maybe moringa leaves. Any thoughts on what would work best for nutrients and what ratios to use?
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I have nothing to add in terms of ratios unfortunately, but i’ve thought for a while some concoction should be possible with a lot of local plants (depending on where you are). I’ve toyed with Aquaponics for a while (utilsing naturally forming bacteria to convert fish ammonia to nitrates) and when my fish all died due to a powercut i’ve replaced their contribution with rabbit urine. I’ve heard moringa is good for getting iron into foliar sprays, you have to make some kind of tea from the leaves. Other plants i want to try are tithonia (mexican sunflower) and gliricidia leaves made into a tea for fertigation.
One thing to think about with the chicken manure is getting it on edible parts of the plant with a risk of e-coli, in my research it seems rabbit excrement and urine can be used cold with minimal risk to humans, where as other excrement cow, goat etc is way more dangerous. Another reason aquaponics is safer with fish waste.
I’d love to hear more about the setup you plan to use, look up the kratky method, it seems really simple and great for off-grid applications
This post is kind of related to hydroponics…
Do you know anyone who has ever raised catfish in a barrel? See link below.
But if you remove the photos it is only 5.5 pages of actual text. The last 1.5 pages of text can be skipped. So it is really just 4 pages of text.
Materials needed:
two 55-gallon steel drums
three panes of glass 24 inches square
a medium-sized aquarium air pump. He chose to use the Metaframe Hush II aquarium bubbler for oxygenation.
He kept 40 fish in each of the 55-gallon drums. (page 2).
Apparently catfish will feed at temperatures as low as 40-45 degrees, but their greatest growth is at 84 degrees (page 3).
The basic idea is to feed table scraps to worms and then feed worms to the fish.
Page 6 (top) says "A seven ounce catfish fingerling grows to 25 ounces in the summer, thus producing a pound of food in four months.
Sincerely
Craig
Well his little hydroponic system is working pretty well. We’ve just been using a tea from various leaves, mostly moringa. You can tell it’s not a perfectly balanced solution, some deficiencies but they are growing. We’re going to try adding water from cleaning out their fish tank soon. With the heat we’ve had to occasionally had to at a frozen 2 litter bottle of water to the bucket to keep the water cool. We’re growing Bok Choy and Basil in it.
