[blane perun]

This post is actually a continuation on a previous one entitled “A few ideas on how to get started with a Home Coral Farm. “ I changed the title to share the info to a larger amount of people. The first post was about how to get started with a home farm, however Looking back I think the information could benefit anyone just looking to propagate coral And sell or trade a few pieces locally. We can all agree the hobby is expensive, so if you don’t have the time to create a small scale farm perhaps you could jump into propagation like I did and use it as a catalyst to grow your reef. Below is a photo of my 450 gallon system if you look closely to the left you can see two tanks in the system were converted to specifically grow fragmented coral.



All of these tanks are tied together and drain to a sump under the main tank. This made it very easy to set up propagation tanks running off the main filtration. I had however encountered some problems being that everything was in one system. One mistake I made was to assume the DSB in the sump would adequately handle the grow tanks, and boy was I mistaken. My sump is a 120 gallon tank about 4 foot by 4 foot with at least A 12 inch DSB. What I found was as close as the sump was in the system the fact that it was remote to the propagation tanks decreased its effectiveness for those two systems. Actually it took me a few months to figure out that was the cause of the problem. The blooms of nuisance algae soon disappeared completely after I had created a DSB in each Propagation tank to locally deal with the nutrients.



Above you can see a close up of one of the two SPS grow tanks. I used egg crate from Home Depot to make the stands and plastic sandwich containers filled with Aragonite To hold my plugs. The set up worked well, however every 6 weeks I would have to clean off the containers from an algae buildup. Looking back there was just too much free surface area. I eventually had traded in the homemade setup for some nice acrylic shelves drilled to hold the plugs. Each shelf held about 70 props on plugs, I had two shelves in each system. These tanks were only 50 gallons, but plumbed into the main system. If you Don’t have the benefit of extra tanks laying around, think of creating a shelf in the back of your tank, in a lower flow zone to hold your props. The objective here is to show the beginners how easy and enjoyable propagation can be. With a simple home aquarium you can start a small farm, or just grow a few frags for trade to some of the members in your local club.