Hello everyone,
I'm Tony from Williamston, Michigan. I am a husband and father of 2 girls. We like to live a healthy lifestyle and only heard of AP about a year ago. Since then, it's been on my mind and this winter I'm doing something about it. Several months ago, we tried getting our feet wet with a simple Hydroponic setup and some lettuce, spinach, kale, and arugula from http://www.mypatriotsupply.com (a bit pricy but non-gmo and fresh seeds). Well, it was fun but short lived... our setup only allowed for 10 net pots and now we are out of fresh lettuce (spinach, kale, & arugula were small and short lived) . I've started more but we need a bigger system to accommodate our families needs.
Growing Arrangements:
We live in a ranch home with a full but unfinished basement. All of the open, unused space below our feet should be good for something, right? I've got a very large utility room that will be used for our AP room. The temperature down there maintains about 66 degrees F year round and the lettuce loved it. I've included a design I drew up using Google SketchUp (free & simple CAD software). It is based off others we liked after searching around online. It seems to save space and allows use of vertical space. I plan on using either 6' or 10' sections of 4" PVC pipe. Should be either 30 or 50 plants (depending on length of pipe I use) and that's as far as I have planned. I am not sure what way I want to go for the FT or FT's... I'm debating on whether I should build my own box/es with pond liners or use plastic livestock water tanks? I cannot use the big totes that many use because of the stairway access to the basement only has a 30" door opening. My wife dislikes my crazy idea of using a small above ground pool (but I like the idea of pre-constructed
). Ideally, we'd like to grow trout and/or perch, not sure if we are keen on tilapia. Plus I love the idea of just walking downstairs to catch fresh trout! 
She thinks that crawfish/yabbies would be awesome but to me they seem like they would be a lot of work (keeping them from killing each other?).We plan on continuing with different lettuce varieties, as well as re-experimenting with the previously failed spinach, kale, etc... I believe they failed because we were late transplanting them from the starter cubes. I also anticipate that this is only the beginning of a much larger scale based on just about everybody's "first try" post I've read.
Any recommendations on tank size, number of fish, starter fish so I don't lose a ton of $ getting it up and running/balancing levels?
Thank you in advance for the responses!
| Attachments: |
|
File comment: Basic design, probably will use 4" round PVC to save on build costs. First NFT Design.JPG [ 53.01 KiB | Viewed 566 times ] |
