Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Can anyone tell me about their attempts at these?

I love my berries and would like to grow them in my grow tanks. Has this been tried? If so I would like to know how it went. Cheers, Jim

I'm going to try to get some raspberries from BIL to see how they go. I've got some baby mulberry trees in, so no idea how they'll go yet.
Of course, and strawberries in towers, still too young to flower yet.

Correct me if I'm wrong here folks, but with many varieties of berries being happiest in mildly alkaline soil, wouldn't it be theoretically possible to run your system significantly harder (stocking densities, ammonia levels etc) growing berries exclusively?

Just a thought...could be a great potential niche market for maverick aquaponicianadoes...

did not know that jez....................very interesting as the target being used for AP here 7.0 to 7.2 is probably a bit more alkaline that most plants would prefer..............very interesting indeed................

I thought that a lot of berries like an acid soil.

Many berries naturally occur as understorey species in forests where the debri from the trees acidifies the soil.

This link contains soil ph info not sure how accurate it is because some of the entries don't make sense to me.

http://www.extension.umn.edu/distributi ... 31-29.html

This one goes into great depth about the acid soil needs of blue berries (which grow naturally in confier forests ie very acid soil)

http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalo ... 1560-e.pdf

The only issue I see with many berries is that they are not the biggest feeders, and/or many have dormant periods. I guess they could be interplanted with other vigorous feeders, or used in a drain to waste situation..

IF they had dormant periods good you vary their cycling rate? Run them on a long cycle or run to waste cycle while dormant then up the cycle rate when they were more active?

Strawbs seem to love hydroponic systems .. so I reckon they may be well suited to aquaponic...

Would love to hear about strawb growing ...

Quite a few of the more common ones eaten in the Western world do Stuart, but that is only a tiny fraction of the berries in the world. Typically, astringent berries thrive best in at least mildly alkaline soil...one example which could be lucrative to grow commercially is Goji berry - that thrives with a PH from ~7.2 to ~8.4. If you can couple that with something like relatively high density specialty eel production and not need to stress out over needing super high quality water or a close to neutral PH, it seems to me that in theory you'd have a well balanced and lucrative system.

There are plenty of other 'niche' berry varieties which would be suitable. As far as I know, as you mention, blueberries are the only berries that have absolutely zero tolerance for alkalinity...though there are a few that you'd suspect wouldn't thrive or would lack some essential uptakes.

Some vigorous varieties of blackberry and raspberry tolerate weak alkalinity quite well - especially if they're kept moist as they would be in an AP system.

Alkaline soils tend to occur most in semi-arid and arid regions...where you'd think that on an evolutionary level, water availability would have been at least as much of an issue as soil PH.




Yeah EB, it does present problems at a home production level...though the drain to waste suggestion could be a goer if room was available. I was musing more along the lines of commercial level production.