Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

"But times change and people change - sometimes time changes people."

I love this!
It is very profound!

Feel like I've been heading towards aquaponics all my life. I've always kept fish since age 5, started my first vege garden when I was 9 and have loved to cook since about my mid-teens. Now that I have kids, I'm trying to teach them the value and benefits of sourcing and cooking/preserving your own food.

When I first stumbled across aquaponics in very late 2008 - IT JUST MADE PERFECT SENSE ! everything clicked.

My Wifw made me do it!!!!

It's hard to remember exactly what got me hooked originally. Back in those days AP information was very limited, photos of aquaponics systems that you could find online were almost non existent, especially small scale backyard systems. You had the aquaponics journal and the Speraneo list serve for information, with a few other bits and pieces here and there is you looked hard enough.

The simplicity of aquaponics is what initially grabbed me I guess, the "common sense" behind it. I spent time mucking around with AP, but it did start to wear a bit thin there for a while. There certainly wasn't the community aspect, the support and sharing that there is now, and my friends were sick to death of hearing about it, and at one stage I almost stopped doing it... I couldn't believe that the only information you could buy at the time was the AP journal and the Speraneo manual of less than 20 pages. I became motivated by the fact that I felt there needed to be more information "out there", so I made a crappy website and started writing, filming and taking photos.

This really became my driving motivation, that more people would do it, if they could only hear about aquaponics, if they could see that it worked and learn a bit more about it, surely it had to catch on more than what it had at that stage, and I believed that aquaponics deserved a place in every backyard..

Four or five years back I didn't want to deal in hardware or systems, but things change I guess, there were so many people asking "where's my closest AP shop?" I could see it starting to become a hindrance to AP catching on if people couldn't easily get systems and components. I still get a buzz every time someone walks in the shop and says "wow, why have I never heard of this before, this makes so much sense."

My main motivation is still the information side of things though. We are in the middle of creating a new aquaponics website aimed at bringing together all the information from around the internet, links to every AP website and forum, daily news sourced from the many related websites, blogs, news sites, forums etc, new video updates every week. We're getting a good start to it already and I'm amazed at the number of websites out there devoted to aquaponics now..

The dog eat dog commercial side of aquaponics annoys me, everyone scrambling to make a name for themselves, climbing over each other, down treading others to try and get to the top of the heap. The experts that appear each month provides a bit of a giggle, but also probably detracts from good AP information a fair bit. The self appointed and highly opinionated social AP commentators can get rather annoying at times as well. Hence the reason I don't post anywhere near as much as I have in the past. Having people pick up your posts and dissect them, offering their own critique with their skewed interpretations is rather frustrating. In fact I can almost guarantee that this post is bound to get a serious dissection and critiquing elsewhere.

But that's life, all part of the fun of AP I guess when you take it to different levels....

Now I suppose I'm hooked on AP in too many ways, it's not like I can just give it up and go cold turkey...

Good one axl i like it

I can go with that too many picking at what you say you will notice i dont post much any more

"Picking" on what EB mentioned in his post, unfortunately there are some people that no matter how hard you try to show them the common sense behind Aquaponics, they will never understand the benefits. I have had people commenting on things like "wow, the electricity cost of running this would be enormous..." but they run a pond pump in their backyard?? Also things like "only 720grms of fish??, I get a 1kg and above fishing at this so and so place... " but I fish it out from my backyard?? And "wow", 1000L of tank, your water consumption must be very high" but I only do top up of the water???

So I am glad that we have got this forum...

I agree there, just make sure you set up your gravel washing ergonomically or your back might not think it very healthy. Must not bend as swishing or the back be hurting.


Anyway, I guess I came in from the food side. I had been touring with a certain Irish Dance Show and was getting really sick of trying to eat healthy while living in hotel rooms. So when I quit, I think I went a little nuts. I started doing hydroponics in my little apartment to grow lettuce. I was trying to grow veggies on my 9' by 9' shady patio and we were even humanure composting (kinda a challenge on such a small patio.) Back at that time I was active on some hydroponic forums and followed the line that there was no true "organic" hydroponics. I had not stumbled onto any information that explained Aquaponics adequately and what little I had seen didn't really impress (it really seemed like a limping along way to feed some house plants I guess.) Moved into a House with a yard in Feb 2006 and started improving the soil and trying out some DIY hydroponics outside as well as still doing the DWC lettuce indoors under lights.

However, when I did stumble onto the BYAP Forum WOW! Now here is where I did find the information to explain it all. That was in December 2007. Back then, it was possible to read all the posts every day. Anyway, I was collecting parts to build a barrel ponics system the week I discovered BYAP. I've been heavily into this ever since.
Thank you to Joel for working so hard in the early days to get information regarding backyard scale aquaponics out to the masses. And thank you to many of the other early members of the forum who helped populate the forum with the basic information and all those early system threads and info on everything to do with flood and drain media bed systems.

I did not know enough about fish keeping and the nitrogen cycle before finding this forum to have been willing to attempt aquaponics before finding this site.

Now I have a 1/3rd acre lot with a house and driveway on it that is producing a huge amount of our own food. While Aquaponics may only be part of it, it is a big part.

A few years back I was talking to a friend about keeping our dreams alive and not getting to caught up in the work/pay bills/own home / be made to be a slave to the ATO and banks stuff

I had just finished 12 years of working out at sea, but always wanted to do aquaculture. To grow fish rather than just to fish out fishery after fishery and deplete ocean stocks of fish was always my dream.

After talking into the night about keeping our dreams alive, I went looking on the internet, and stumbled upon aquaponics that same night. I raced home from work to phone an eastern states distributer. We spoke for ages, but I was not into the thought of sending my money to the other side of Australia, being a patritotic Sand Gropper. I looked for a Western Australian supplier, and found BYAP. I think I was transacting the money the same day. I had never seen one, didn't know the forum existed, but just knew I had to have one And I am so glad I did.

Now all I ever whinge about is how am I going to extend it

I think my story will sound alot like TCs eventually. I am so glad I found this place. I hope to get my system running and looking good by the years end. I will start a system thread when I start mine.

I'd been obsessed with hydroponics around the end last year and beginning of this one, but sadly found no way to acquire nutrient solution in Pakistan, even though I got my hands on the rockwool even, not easy believe you me had to use a family contact to the ministry of agricultures national hydroponic gardens, so it all fell flat on its face.

I have never grown plants before, I have kept some fish when I was young, goldfish they were, they all died, mainly of what I now know to be Ick, then I just refered to as fish dandruff. I'm a mechanical engineer by education, a producer and theatre actor by day.

I came across aquaponics late one night about a couple of weeks ago, and was immediately intrigued. Soaked up all I could find online, then I came across this forum, and God willing my first, and hopefully not my last, system will be up and running next week. There have been speedbumps with equipment and what not being available, but I have powered through them, and for the first time in my life I feel excited about having fish, maybe it was just that I kept killing them as a child but I've never liked them before, now I can't wait to get them into my tank

i guess i got hooked when i was a kid, i have always kept fish and liked the idea of keeping fish in a big pond that i could fish in, but in a back yard you dont quite have the room or so i thought, well i played arouind with ponds and recerc systems even studied aquaculture a little and used to incorperate plants in recerc systems but then they were called batanicl filters, the idea was to not have to dump water constantly, in the quest for knolidge i stumbled on the BYAP site and the lights went on, i had a small recerc system running so i started adding grow beds and still am and i'm still looking for ways to use space in the back yard to grow more fish and veg!

glad to be hooked!

I'm an Engineer, in to Automation and stuff.
Which translated into layman is: A guy with a degree that entitles him to be lazy, and he does his job better the more lazy he is :-)
I liked to keep fish, but hated cleaning them, and continually lost fish.
I came up with the idea of Ap myself (although I was stuck on using dirt, and the problem of veggie patch dirt tea recirculating)
I was pontificating one day, and my FIL said "They do that already! here look at this website www.backyardaquaponics.com "
So I did, and instead of filtering my indoor FT (which had started this mad idea) I put 10,000 litres of tanks and pond out the back of my place.
It took me 3 years before I hooked up the indoor FT so I never had to clean it again!
But hey, this is where I am now.

I was just a dude with a family and a new house. A fixer-upper.
Took me a year to even get into the back yard there was so much interior work to be done. But I knew to layer leaves and crap and eventually it would make soil, so I threw some stuff down and went back inside.
The second year I experimented with several gardening methods to see what worked best in my own yard. Sub-irrigation bins and raised manured beds did best, no shocker. I had to throw a lot of water at it to keep stuff alive... started planning for the built-out raised bed garden and irrigation lines... during that time I started to try to figure out what to do with the neglected pond and its goldfish.
Happened upon Jaymie's perfectly-sized system thread and that was it.
"Why isn't anyone here doing this? Why isn't EVERYONE doing this?!?"
It just makes sense.

Now it seems that each time I teach myself something like plumbing or electrical for the AP system, it helps me raise the quality of the "Indoor" projects as well.

Rick

I have always been a keen gardner, have kept aquarium fish in the past and like to know where my food comes from, must be the southern european upbringing.

We decided a while back to try and grow as much of our own fruit and veg as possible. The first thing we had to do was try and work out what would grow in our neck of the woods. Cherry trees were the first things we planted and then some apples and other stone fruits. The veggie garden was the next thing to go in, three raised grow beds which gave us enough vegetables for the three of us.

The first time I saw anything to do with aquaponics was when Joel was being interviewed on Gardening Australia. I just couldn't believe the simplicity in the idea. It just makes perfect sense, afterall people have been using reed beds for water filtration for, well for centuries.
The next day I was Googling away and found Joel's site and they have been stuck with me ever since.
Since we have been running the aquaponics system, I have been able to grow things which in the past have been beyond me for one reason or another. Cauliflower for example, have always been a disaster for me in the dirt garden.. As for cellery, I have never ever been able to grow it without it bolting to seed.
Last year, as an experiment I put in a Hop rhizome to see how it would grow. This is one that I had taken a cutting from a parent plant and managed to get it to strike. I was extremly surprised, it not only flourished but produced flowers in the first year.
The feed of fish we have gotten has been well recieved by family and friends and surplus has been a great for bartering.

There is whole lot more I could write but I'm at work and they are glaring at me..

Himzo.