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This post is my entry for the Meadows and Makers Challenge No. 2, Aqua / Hydroponic Garden makers challenge. You can see the post for this challenge by going to this link. https://steemit.com/gardening/@jackdub/maker-challenge-no-2-aqua-hydroponic-garden-maker-challenge-25-steem-in-rewards
I don't currently have a system in operation because winter is almost here, and I set up my aquaponics system in my greenhouse. I can't keep the greenhouse warm in the winter in this climate because it was not designed hold heat in the winter. I will write about the typical aquaponics setup that I would normally use.
I set the system up in April of this year to get it started. I use a 100 gallon livestock watering tank to hold the water and the fish for the system. This is the basic system being set up.
This year, I put some of my pond plants in the aquaponics tank along with the goldfish. I have a tank in the house that I keep some of the pond plants in over the winter so that I don't have to buy new ones every year. These are floating plants, and they multiply fairly quickly in warm weather. I had too many plants in the tank in the house, so I brought some of them out to the aquaponics tank.
I use Hydroton expanded clay ball hydroponic growing medium for my aquaponic setup. The stuff is lightweight, and there's plenty of room for roots to expand into it once the plants start growing. I had a small tomato plant to put into the growing medium, so I started with that. I like to leave the plant in the dirt that it was started in, and I put that into a coconut coir pot. That pot will hold the dirt in but allow the roots to grow through it. Then I put the coconut coir pot into a plastic net pot, the kind that's used for hydroponics growing. In this case, the net pot was too big for the coir pot, so I filled the space with clay balls. It can be hard to find the right size match for both pots depending on what the hydroponics dealer has in stock. In this picture, I had just started the pump and it was starting to fill up the growing media container. I use the typical submersible pump that's used for hydroponics growing. I set the media containers up with a water input, which you see in the picture, and a drain that has a strainer on it to keep the clay balls out of the drain.
I didn't have a lot of fish in the big tank, so I decided to just go with 1 container setup to start with. I put a few of my tomato starts into the container on top of the media so they would get good sun. There's also a certain amount of warmth that comes from the water at night to keep them from getting too cold in the greenhouse. It still gets below freezing outside in April.
In May, I started another group of tomato plants, after having moved the first ones to bigger dirt pots. The aquaponics tomato was growing as well as could be expected for the cool conditions in the greenhouse.
I decided to set up the second growing media container to use with the system. The original holes in the bottom of the container were too far from the ends of the container so I made new holes for the fill and drain, and plugged the old holes. The larger tube will be the drain, I connect the hose from the pump to the smaller tube. You have to make sure that the water will drain out of the container fast enough to keep up with the pump so that the container doesn't fill up and overflow.
I decided to try using a couple of net pots to keep the growing media away from the fill and drain connections, I figured it would be a lot easier to keep them clean that way. The drain tends to get clogged with roots and has to be cleaned out once the system is growing well, and it's hard to keep the clay balls out of the drain tube without the extra screens. I had to put holes in the bottom of the net pots large enough to get the fill and drain connectors through.
I filled the container with clay balls to the level that I wanted and then planted 2 strawberry plants in the container, using coconut coir pots with dirt in them to give the plants a good start.
At the end of May, everything was doing quite well, including the pond plants in the big tank. The goldfish will eat the roots of the floating plants, but I still feed them pond fish food every day to keep them well fed.
I only have a couple of pictures of the aquaponics setup from June. This is the best one, the other one is out of focus.
I took these 2 pictures sometime in July, they were the only ones I took directly of the aquaponics setup. At this point I was starting to get a lot of cherry tomatoes from the main tomato plant. You can see that the plant is not very thick, it looks more like a vine here. I'm guessing that could have been due to having the roots in constant water, and probably not enough nutrients due to my not having enough fish in the big tank.
I've been experimenting with aquaponics for 6 years now, and I've come to a couple of conclusions. One is that I don't have enough fish in the tank to make enough nutrients for more than a couple plants. Another is that it's really hard to get rid of whiteflies in the greenhouse when you have fish in the aquaponics tank. You have to be really careful not to use something on the whiteflies that can kill the fish. That limits your choices on how to control insect infestations if they happen.
This was not my most successful year with aquaponics, but it wasn't too bad , considering what I had planted in the system.
That's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
Thanks for stopping by my page and checking out my post, eh!
