50/50 perlite / vermiculite

[flkoi]

What vegetables would do best in a 50/50 mix of perlite and vermiculite ? I'll be using a timed drip in 3 gallon buckets . I reading article about okra on a at this site and I will be doing okra , I think it will do well , what else would work well this media combination ?

[keith_r]

i've heard that perlite doesn't work to well in ap, ends up all through the system..
i think okro would be fine in a gravel growbed

[rfeiller]

welcome to the forum

[urbanfarmer]

What vegetables would do best in a 50/50 mix of perlite and vermiculite ? I'll be using a timed drip in 3 gallon buckets . I reading article about okra on a at this site and I will be doing okra , I think it will do well , what else would work well this media combination ?

Just about anything...

[JCO]

You would be better off with gravel or Hydrotron...no mix substitute...it only clogs the system.

[davidstcldfl]

Hi flkoi, along the line of what JCO was saying.... You didn't give too many details.....Are you dripping into the buckets, and then they drain onto the ground like verti-grow systems 'usually' do ?

[rfeiller]

perlite is used with coir or by itself with drip systems, but using it with a contineous flow with a bell siphon that it could breakdown and go throughout your system as was mentioned.

[flkoi]

Here at my farm there is an abundance of water , settlement and bio filters . The norm is to do a 10 to 20% water change ( extract directly from the koi tanks right on the ground ) . My idea is to draw water from a bio filter using a timed drip or trickle , having the pump come on about once an hour for about 5 minutes or so , then it would be discarded , giving my water change water a second use . I may eventuality collect the water and filter it again then return it again to the koi .

Here the koi are first priority , we try to produce show quality koi (we don't get many a lot of them ) that pound for pound can be worth 500 times more valuable than tilapia , even the non-show quality koi( we do get quite a few of these ) can be worth 10 times a tilapia of the same size .

[rfeiller]

sounds like it work fine for you. what i see here is coir with commercial chunk size perlite with drip systems in large hydroponics systems and they all have recoveries, since the water is considered hazardous materials, which it isn't with aquaponics.