Once I decided to give Aquaponics a try, I needed to figure out what was the best way to do it. For me, that means the cheapest. Going back to YouTube, I found this video...
A simple raft with plants rooted in the water. That might work. Some plants don't like wet roots, so it probably won't work for them, but other stuff, lettuce, cabbage and the like, stuff with a high water content should do fine.
The finished raft
So I went to Jerry's and picked up a couple of sheets of Styrofoam at about $2 for a 2'x8'x1" sheet. I figured that a 2" thick raft would be sufficient to hold up anything. I made the rafts roughly 18"x36" with the plants about 9" on center. I used a Styrofoam cutter to cut the holes for the baskets. It's basically a hot (warm) wire that cuts through the foam like a dull knife through cold butter. I also used a hot glue gun to glue the sheets together.
Styrofoam Cutter
I used 2" baskets that I got from In & Out Hydroponics in Junction City for about 50 cents each. While I was there I also picked up a bale of coconut coir for $11. I used less than a bucks worth to pot all 12 plants.
I've always wanted to be a farmer. But I've always been told that "You can't make a living at that." or "You're too smart to waste your time farming." Well, life hasn't really been that great for me so far. So when my step-father mentioned that the family farm in Pennsylvania might be available if I wanted to "start over", I started looking into different methods of sustainable "intensive farming", a way of taking multiple crops from a single piece of property.
One of the methods that caught my interest early was Aquaponics. Aquaponics is a method of growing plants hydroponically in conjunction with raising fish, often for food purposes. In aquaponics, the fish provide the fertilizer for the hydroponically grown vegetables. The fish produce urea which is converted to nitrites, and then nitrates by the bacteria in the pond gravel. By using this nitrate rich water to irrigate the plants, you can grow vegetables and other plants without soil and without additional fertilizers.
I saw this video on YouTube about Growing Power, a non-profit in Milwaukee that produces a MILLION pounds of food each year on only 3 acres of land.
Since seeing this video, I've had to change my overall plans, but aquaponics still intrigues me. So this summer, I decided to use my mother's fish pond for an experiment in growing vegetables aquaponically. This blog is a record of that experiment.
