Adding salt as a tonic to the system up to 3ppt or three kilos of salt per 1000 litres of water can help the fish recover but it also compounds the situation with growing salt sensitive plants like strawberries. Don’t aggravate your fish with unnecessary handling. Stress is one of the biggest killers of fish. Fins were caught in the netting and sometimes the slippery fish were dropped and injured as they flipped on the ground. The constant stress of netting the fish aggravated the situation. The slime coating acts as a defensive barrier to protect against nasty bacteria, fungal pathogens and parasites. Fish have a slippery slime coating that covers their scales and skin. Inevitably their natural slime coating was disturbed. He had setup a system in a bad location and then compounded his problems by stressing his fish! Everyone who came to his house was treated to a look at his struggling fish. So back to the friend with a poor system and why his strawberries and fish weren’t happy. People too often get swept away talking about pumps and plumbing and forget that the system is basically using nature to do all the heavy work. It seems like common sense but there are a growing number of people who place too much reliance on the “miracle” of aquaponics to solve basic plant requirement issues and fail to understand the basics principals of normal gardening. Are there any overhanging trees or branches that should be trimmed? If you are fortunate to have a nice sunny spot near your house then that is the ideal location to site your system. Monitor your sunlight and watch where the shadows strike in the morning and afternoon. Keeping the sun shining on your growbeds makes a big difference. We regularly clip a tall hedge plant that threatens to block the sunshine from falling on one of our grow-beds. If you run an indoor system then you must use grow lights to enable the plants to grow. It must be sited in a sunny location that has around 6 hours of sunshine per day. Strawberries grow well in aquaponics but don’t like salt in the system. No matter how good an aquaponics system is designed and built, it still must adhere to some basic principles of growing food. Sited under balcony eaves, it hardly got any sunshine throughout the day so the plants looked weak and spindly. We noticed that the site where his aquaponics system was erected was placed in a poor location. This worked to a certain extent but his fish were still progressively dieing and the salt level was affecting salt-sensitive plants like strawberries. Some of the surviving fish had bacterial infections on their sides and looked distressed.Īn aquaponics forum had suggested that he add salt into the system to rejuvenate the fish. He didn’t have a green thumb he said, because certain other plants in his system weren’t doing too well either.Ĭloser investigation revealed that the fish were not happy and some had even died. He didn’t have any success in growing them and was wondering if he was doing something wrong or indeed, if this aquaponics thing was over-hyped? Recently a friend was telling me about how difficult it was to grown strawberries in his aquaponics system. This barramundi grown in aquaponics has a fine slime coating preventing bacterial infections.