Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

New moon, and night temps are finally getting down...
Shopping for seeds today.
This could be one of the most useful threads ever (at least for beginners)!

Rick

Now duckweed might not be a primary fast food for us, but it is a great fast plant for using up nutrients.
I had a bed get a leak lately and have pulled the gravel out and to keep up the filtration, I filled the bed to below the level of the leak and put duckweed in it. The duckweed is growing well, providing some nice supplement feed for the fish and helping keep the water quality good till I have time to deal with the problem.

I must admit that much of the plants in my AP system are actually longer term plants since the really fast things like turnips, salad, etc tend to grow only during a short period of the year here and do quite well out from under the plastic and in the dirt. (Salad would do fine in the NFT pipe but only for about 3 months when it is cooler.)
I have put some very long term but nutrient hungry plants into my AP system to help use up nutrients. Bananas are very greedy and growing very well in AP. Papaya is another fast grower when it gets good sun and nutrients though it still takes over a year from seed to fruit harvest. I've found I kinda need fast plants in much of the dirt garden since the seasons get too hot too fast. However, since the AP system is protected by greenhouse plastic, I can do long term tropical plants in AP while in the dirt garden they get frozen back during cold snaps in winter.

I need to find some more greedy plants to suck down nutrients over the too hot/humid summer when most good greedy garden plants don't do well here. Or maybe I just need to grow lots and lots of banana suckers over summer.