Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Recently I read about someone with a tree nursery, who was using fish to fertilize the trees.

The growing area where the pots were set out had a slight slope to it, and a liner was placed on the ground with a raised lip around the edges. The pots were placed out on the liner and left to grow. There was a dam full of fish just near to the growing area, and 3 or 4 times a day water is pumped up from the fish pond, flooding the area of liner with all of the pots sitting on it, before the water drains back into the fish pond.

Evidently this quadrupled the growth rate of his trees, and gives the added bonus that your not watering by overhead sprinklers which can often cause diseases.

Hi,
I think this is the most common aquaponic system and also the most undocumented, because a lot of farmer around the world are used to stock fish in their water pond and a lot of them don t know the <<aquaponic>> word.
It could be necessary in some country in europe and africa to have soil as growing media to have organic certification, but i didn t find a lot of documentation about it if you can share your link or someone else could,

Sounds like a fantastic low-energy integrated system. You could intensify it adding a low-energy bio-filtration system to the pond. You could also have a second smaller fish-less pond pumping to the trees, which is periodically topped up by with water from the fish pond; this way you could use pest control and further fertilization methods without risking harm to the fish. The water temp would also be more stable in the fish pond... I imagine the flooding operation could heat the water of a pond pretty quickly in a hot climate, unless the pond was very large compared to the volume pumped for flooding.

There is a large market garden in the northern suburbs that has been doing similar for years, at least they used to... Apparently they were the farm that was caught up in the big immigration bust that was on the news a couple of years ago and the owners were going for a row.

They don't recirculate the nutrient though. They have a number of large lined ponds filled with Silvers and they pump water from the ponds through the irrigation system, then top up the ponds with fresh water.

I guess whether to recirculate or not would depend on the relative cost/value of resources. Re-circulation would presumably save water but would require more infrastructure in the form of pots and plastic liner etc, whereas one-way irrigation would just require fairly abundant water.

I guess a hybrid system would be also possible

There’s a nursery in the NT that irrigates from a tank that they keep Barra in

I reckon I heard about it on the country hour