Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

And there was no mention of the seasonal nature of the crops grown. People these days want things but are not prepared to plan for them by planting in advance of their needs.
People may expect that they can get lettuce & tomato in the depths of winter, without having a greenhouse, just a 2bed, 1Kl AP system.

Speaking of advertising. Google searches for aquaponics, and now fluidized sand bed filters pull up this forum in the search results withing the first two pages. Its kinda weird to start seeing my post when searching for info

Organic vegies are all the rage but in the drought and with availability low, they can set you back a pretty penny at your local supermarket.

What if you could have your own organic vegie garden that uses only a bucket of water a week? And your own fish farm to boot.

Paul Geering is the Project Officer for Sustainable Practices at TAFE and he's set up a way of doing just that.

With just two old bathtubs, a length of pipe and a fish tank, Paul has turned a piece of dry, scrubby ground next to a TAFE car park into a fully functioning aquaponics system.

Aquaponics is a hybrid of Aquaculture and Hydroponics and uses a symbiotic water relationship between fish and plants in a self-sustaining system. Paul sees aquaponics as a very real alternative to conventional farming and a novel way to beat the drought.

Sustainability is what it's all about for Paul, who's mission is to use less water and more smarts in the fight to save the environment. The system he's set up at the Sunraysia Institute of TAFE is only small at this stage but he hopes it will soon provide enough fresh herbs, some vegetables and fish for the TAFE's cooking school and restaurant and inspire others to give aquaponics a go in their own backyard.

Ever conscious of the environment, Paul has used recycled materials where possible. Two old bathtubs have been sourced from local farmers and the fish tank is an old plastic container which once held molasses which was used to feed cattle. The bathtubs are filled with a mix of gravel, including porous, volcanic gravel which Paul says is a very healthy medium for plants to grow in.

A pipe runs from the fish tank to the bath tubs and the fishy, nutrient-rich water is used to feed the grow-out beds.

The TAFE's fish tank currently contains one thousand silver perch fingerlings, which are native to this area of Australia. Like any fish tank, they create waste which is toxic to them and must be filtered out. "By pumping that water up into the grow-out bed," explains Paul, "all the bacteria convert the ammonia and the nitrites to ammonium nitrates." This he says, is a great fertiliser which is filtered out of the water the as it runs through the gravel. Clean, fresh water then flows back into the fish tank.

It's not only an efficient way of growing vegetables with little water, says Paul, but it's also a time efficient way of getting your groceries. From speaking with other aquaponic growers he's discovered plants grow much faster in this medium, and he's heard it can sometimes be up to forty times as fast as conventional soil grown gardens.

If you love your seafood too, you're in luck.

The fish take up to thirty weeks to grow to full size and can then be harvested for eating or on-selling because they too are organically grown. The fish, says Paul "are actually a bi-product of the whole aquaponics system but are very key and crucial to making the whole system work."

In his old industrial bulk container, one thousand fish flit through the water. Paul has gone to some effort to make the tank comfortable for the baby fish by fitting some pipes and other hiding places in the metre deep tank. Right now, the tank is large enough for all of them to live comfortably, but he admits that as they begin to grow, he will have to find alternative homes for the adolescent school.

Understandably, Paul has had a lot of interest in his aquaponics setup and he will soon be running a course at the TAFE on how to get yourself started. While most of these are for a suburban backyard setting, Paul points to some larger operations both in regional and metropolitan Victoria who are turning a tidy profit through aquaponics. He says a part-time aquaponics garden in Melbourne is bringing one man around $60,000 a year in turnover.

"At the end of the day," he says, "the only running costs you have is an air pump, and a water pump." Of course, you also need to feed the fish and pay for water, but at just a bucket of water a week says Paul, that cost is fairly minimal.

Through his eagle eye for recycling, Paul says his small aquaponics system cost under $300 to set up but it can be anywhere up to $4000 depending on the size and extras included.

Paul is confident aquaponics is set "to be the next biggest thing to sliced bread"; bringing organic vegetables and fish into our backyards but also giving us a new tool to fight the drought and those ever rising supermarket prices.

"This way," he says, "we can actually walk out into our backyard, pick what we need, when we need it and just produce some food for ourselves in the backyard."