My Aquaponics ExperimentsteemCreated with Sketch.

in #photography7 years ago (edited)

Aquaponics is a brilliant hobby.  It's educational, sustainable, enviromentally friendly, fun and offers the possibility of growing your own fresh produce. I was more interested in seeing how some of my house plants would react to the system and the results were quite astonishing. 

I built these two aquariums from scratch with a friend of mine. If you are going to buy something that size then it might cost you quite a bit but although putting together a few sheets of glass yourself can be tricky it is well worth the effort in the end. 

I learned quite a  bit about fish too and how they interact with each other. Harbouring tilapia, kois, goldfish and even some crayfish was quite enjoyable. My firefly shrimps had to go into an isolated tiny tank though because they would have been gobbled up in no time with everyone else.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term aquaponics, it's a closed loop system that circulates water between your aquatic life (usually fish) and your beds of vegitation which could be just about anything really. Tomatoes and chillies do really well in those systems but as you can see in the picture, so do houseplants and flowers. No pesticides or fertilisers are ever used and once the system is properly balanced and working you don't even need to change the water in your aquarium. 

Apologies for the terrible quality by the way. The camera wasn't that great and under high pressure sodium lights the picture gets even more blurry.


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Fantastic system. Also good opportunity to use natural pest control - nematodes, natural predators and
the yellow sticky traps.

Ladybirds are the coolest to keep too.

Brilliant idea to enjoy your aquarium while getting rid of the issue of keeping the water clear of the fish waste with the plants! Something Inshould try myself.

It is a brilliant idea indeed. It seems that the ancient hanging gardens utilised concepts from aquaponics which in turn are just simply observations from nature. It is a very rewarding hobby. We even have our own homegrown fish for dinner when it gets too overcrowded and they tilapias get quite big.

Did i mention that the second system we constructed allowed for the fish fry to take refuge in other parts of the system? meaning that we get a couple of hundred new fishies every year.

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Really interesting.

Could one do it without grow lights in a sunny climate and the right exposure?

And any introductory reading materials you might recommend? Looks like a fun project.

I'll probably write more about it too once i'm done with my geodesic dome.

As a corollary, do you think I could protect it in such a way as to be cat resistant? Or would it prove too tempting?

Yes. Ideally you wouldn't need grow lights. The plants would thank you for natural sunlight. You would need to choose the right fish for your temperatures. Tilapia fish can tolerate temperatures from 17 to 35 celcious but their ideal temperature is around 25.

If you live in a warm climate then you might benefit from visiting the Australian Aquaponics site http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/ they have a forum and they sell equipment and
info and services.

You can also lookup the work of "Nate storey" on youtube.

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