What would you do?

[keith_r]

do you mean gammarus? or scuds..

put the worms in with your hydroton.. if that is flood and drain using a syphon, you can certainly put plants in it,, just make sure that the water doesn't "flood" over the top of the hydroton
i thought you had media in your "grow tray" as well.. but now that you said it's just a flood table, add an air stone to it...

[urbanfarmer]

do you mean gammarus? or scuds..

put the worms in with your hydroton.. if that is flood and drain using a syphon, you can certainly put plants in it,, just make sure that the water doesn't "flood" over the top of the hydroton
i thought you had media in your "grow tray" as well.. but now that you said it's just a flood table, add an air stone to it...

gammarus!!!

[wh33t]

some worms will help in the growbed, red wigglers can usually be found at bait shops

Any detritivores can help if they are in large enough quantity. I forgot the name... darn, I will post if I remember to, but they were small shrimp like ones that actually swim around and typically latch on to the roots and eat up all the decaying organic matter. They have had good results, and we have it in our system in Nicaragua with some of the plants that are only floating in water. The Friendly's also use these critters... darn I can't remember the name...

Are they kind of like micro-shrimp? Daphnia? I really wanted to put some crayfish in the bed but I was worried they would munch the roots.

[wh33t]

do you mean gammarus? or scuds..

put the worms in with your hydroton.. if that is flood and drain using a syphon, you can certainly put plants in it,, just make sure that the water doesn't "flood" over the top of the hydroton
i thought you had media in your "grow tray" as well.. but now that you said it's just a flood table, add an air stone to it...

There is hydroton in the net pots which house the rock wool cubes. The roots grow out of the net pot into the flood table and the net pots are suspended in the air via some big styrofoam lids (not really styrofoam, polystyrene or something).

I put air stones in, unfortunately they didn't seem to help much. The PH still dropped dramatically but now that I've physically removed the excess fish waste that has accumulated in the system the PH appears to be steady at 6.2. So I think I'm getting there. I think the mistake I made was that I was too impatient waiting for the nitrate levels to rise, so I put in way too many fish and fed them way too much. It worked great for about 4 weeks, then got really bad all of a sudden lol.

Thanks for your help guys. I'll check out Gammarus as well.