Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Just a quick update, the fish tasted great, the oil fried them with no problems.
I think I will use less clove oil next time as I did get a very faint taste of clove from the skin but it was very faint and if I was not searching for it I dont think I would have recognised it.

Excuse my ignorance but what was clove oil used for?


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It knocks them out rapidly and stops them struggling. Easier (and more humane) to clean and gut them.

Too easy, thanks!


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Thanks for letting me check out your setup the other day Charles, it was a real eye opener. An even bigger thanks for dinner; they were delicious! Flour/Fry pan/Plate, the whole family loved them.

No worries, glad you liked them. The 9 are still alive and eating well.

Took another 8 fish from the system yesterday for dinner.
Nice and plump.

A short time later with the aid of a sharp knife they looked like this.

The innards from one fish produced a liver, some fat and intestines.

Because I hadn't fed them for 2 days and their intestines were empty it made stripping all the fat off very easy.
If you have the, dare I say it, "guts" for it the fried liver is very tasty.
If you decide to go down this route make sure you leave cutting the liver off till last else the gall bladder will leak everywhere and you wont like the taste of that stuff.

This got me to thinking about how much wastage there is from our fish.
If we use the traditional idea then its usually considered that around the 50% mark of a round fish (as opposed to a flat fish) is lost as waste.
As aquaponic practitioners I believe we can view this from a different perspective and state that nothing is wasted.
My 8 fish produced a bowl of fat and a small quantity of liver (fried and eaten on toast)

The fat was rendered down by boiling in water untill all the water had evaporated.

and produced a tumbler of fish oil.

Now the fish are older there is a faint fishy smell from the oil now but it make awesome chips.

This now leaves the heads, fins and guts.

No problems -

straight into the compost. This one is a rotary composter and breaks everything down very rapidly.
At the end of the meal the remaining bones and any uneaten skin also end up here.
All to enrichen the dirt garden.
So I say there is zero wastage in aquaponics.
Wait a minute I hear you say. What about all the scales?
Easy, dry them, grind them to a powder, add to clear lacquer and voila, pearlescent nail varnish.
I rest my case. (not that I went this far )

Quick update.
I started off the system with 100 fry last January.
I lost one by the next day and that was it.
99 fish growing well and ridiculous amounts of veg.
Started harvesting the fish around August and still going strong.
Down to around 40 now at approx 1.3Kg each.
Plus 7 left (2 jumped out from the 9 given to me by belpeor.
The 7 small ones are in one of the sumps, the 40 large ones are in the main tank
Now comes the hard part, when do I add more fish?
I thought that by adding the 7 to the main tank when they are bigger (around 300g at the moment) then 50 fry? or what ever size they are in july to the large sump. Finish eating the large ones, and so on.

The ph has been a bit of a trial of late keeping it around 6.5 and has taken weekly doses of potassium bicarbonate, calcium hydroxide and garden lime to keep it in the range.
Nitrites and ammonia have remained at zero and nitrates hover around the 10ppm
Aside from that the plants and fish seem very healthy and taste awesome.
I've never added any salt to the system either.
Silverbeet still growing madly, watercress very thick, kang-kong more than I can eat, leb cucumbers-heaps of leaves and blossom but only 1 fruit. just finished the beetroot, just sown parsley, iceberg and tomatoes.
My current fav recipe at present is to fillet and skin them, cut into finger sized strips, marinade in salt, pepper, lemon juice and chopped parsley and a dash of chilli powder for approx 2 hours in the fridge then make a very thin tempura batter, deep fry and a dashi/soy/cider vinegar dipping sauce.
All in all I consider the experiment a huge success and hope it continues.

Today I moved the 7 remaining fish from belpeor to the main tank as they had reached around the 750 gram mark and added 30 new fingerlings from www.ausnativefish.com.au.
They were collected from the company at around 10am tuesday and arrived here at 8am today thursday all alive and lively.
This sump is approx 700 litres and has a slo feeding to the next sump which is joined to the next sump where upon it is pumped up to the fish tank.
Still producing masses of plants to eat and there are only approx 25 very large fish left in the main fish tank as we have eaten all the rest.
My fingers are crossed for these new fingerlings.

Really cool setup. Cant wait to try my hand at edible fish in my system soon.

quick update - not much to add, the 30 new fry took a long time to take artificial food and I lost a couple from what looked like starvation they were so thin.
I eventually got them feeding by sticking a heap of elodia in the tank for them to hide in then using aquarium sinking granules and then onto floating cichlid 1mm pellets.
Now they are voracious little feeders and eating anything I feed them.
The 15 left in the main tank are around the 2kg mark, 2 fish fed 6 of us the other evening. A garlic and chilli tempura with dashi and soy dipping sauce.
Put a couple of new tropic tomatoes in, good growth but nowhere near the fruit from the first lot.
The leeks were excellent but mixed diameter bodies, some thick, some finger size, all tall with heaps of leaves.Parsley, kang kong, watercress and pak choy over the top, for the beans I found that planting them so they just touch the wet part of the gravel worked, dont let them sit in the water else they rot before shooting.
As soon as we finish the remaining big fish the new ones will be transferred to the large tank and new babes will go in the rearing tank to hopefully give us all year round supply.

Massive amounts of flat beans from just 8 plants.
The parsley was huge then each plant over a week developed grubs in the root mass and keeled over. Something to look for next time, maybe a spray of dipel as a precaution.
The fry are doing well but I lost about 8 last month when we had a couple of power cuts and for some reason the pump stopped pumping at full rate so only the main fish tank received a little fresh water.
The smaller fish tank didnt get any fresh input water.
Also the main fish tank is the only one with a small air pump so that may also have contributed to the survival of the big fish and loss of the small fish.
I found that my water pump was delivering ok but not as much as it used to so I used the spare in tandem, ie, one pump feeding the second pump feeding into the fish tank. This really boosted the flow rate.
I purchased a small piston air pump from Hong Kong and have 3 airstones at the bottom of each fish tank, an amazing amount of air now.
I hope to plumb the new water pump in tomorrow for a 10000l/h flow but have to incorporate some sort of bypass so as not to flood the grow beds too much.
I found today that even though I have my grow beds under shade cloth the gravel was hot to the touch so I think for the summer I will add another layer of shade cloth to help control this.
With the new equipment the total power consumption has dropped to 110W, this is seriously into the realms of using solar but the outlay is still a bit exorbitant for panels, MPPT controller, batteries, inverter.
I'm attempting to engineer for 3-4 days without sun. Thats a lot of expensive batteries.
The good if not unusual news is that I found two baby fish in the main tank this morning.
pic here viewtopic.php?f=2&t=265&p=525586#p525586
This begs the questions -
when did they spawn,
how many eggs were laid,
where were they laid - walls, floor, pipework?
how many eggs were eaten
how many hatched,
how many fry were eaten
and what did the fry eat to get to the size they are now.
The time span and their current size would agree with the power cuts emulating low water flows and poor water quality then the repairs producing the summer flood.. Just a thought.
The air stones went in only a couple of days ago so they didnt contribute to the spawn.
Make me wonder about adding pot plants into the tank for cover if they dont eat them.
I added a heap of elodea into the fingerling tank and it didnt seem to be eaten, at least not enough to stop it growing profusely and the small fish seemed to prefer hiding in it.
I think if I can see the babies tomorrow I should net them and place then in my aquarium.

wow, its been a year since I updated this.
I never did catch the babies and only ever saw the two
Still going strong, heaps of veg although tomatoes have been very lacklustre.
Only have approx 10 fish in the large tank but they are around the 2.4+ kg mark, they fight like hell on a hook.
All my leafy greens were decimated by caterpillars and aphids whist on holiday and wouldn't recover so they've been removed.
I was given some strange thick stemmed plant with purple under leaf and dark green upper leaf, the leaves are a little fleshy and taste ok raw but stir fried very fast with peanut oil and a touch of sesame oil is awesome.
A fast vigorous grower so I think another bed for this.
My watercress is really slow with pin holes in the leaves, any ideas anyone?
And thats it up to date.
Still not fed up with it all and still like the fish.
I tried some as sashimi the other week, ok but not fantastic, the flesh is a bit too chewy.