Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

My wife and I are members of a backyard growers board and I posted a quick question to see if anyone had ever messed with hydroponics or aquaponics. This was one guys reply...pasted

"Yes I have. There are some applications that may be used for starting cutting, but none of them lend them selves to large operations. I have used hydroponics to clone some very hard to grow cuttings. Aquaponics is not a viable way to actuall grow a bunch of food and fish. Its been tried (and sold as such) but has never actually caught on.

Visit my website at http://www.crescenthydroponics.com or Google Crescent Hydroponics"

We have come across similar responses before - but I am of the mind that the people who say these things have only tried one approach to AP (and there are SO many different ways of doing things in AP) - and when that way does not turn out to be THE mirical way of doing things they throw their hands up and say that AP is BS

yeh, close to my take.

a dude does it wrong, it crashes and burn ergo the whole idea is crap.............LOL

we all must be hallucinating here i guess as are the speraneo's in the states

Well maybe I shoulda gave up as well but I'm no quitter would have been less stress though, but this guy is on something good, check out his pic from his site

I wonder what seeds he was smoking when he drew that.... thing!

Obviously that person has also not heard of the big hydroponic growers supplying live bib lettuce to supermarkets. We have now all seen examples of how well AP can work on a large (for backyard) scale providing lots of veggies to a family as well as fish.

Of course if this person hooked up a small system and didn't get spectacular growth in the first two months and then junked it. I would guess that this might also be one of those people that will insist that growing organically is pointless cause the first season trying not to use the chemicals, the growth was poor and the pests were rampant.

Main problem, no patients. I know I've made some terrible generalizations here but I suspect most of you get my point.

I tend to agree with you ... if you are serious about it and are in for the long haul, things will come right! (if you keep an open mind)

I've been on many forums and I sometimes find it very interesting when some one makes a statement that this or that doesn't work. I think oh really? Then why has my garden been getting better each season? Or some one says, using mulch won't improve soil structure so I have to pull out the pictures of my dirt when I started and the pictures of some of my soil after only a season or two of using lots of mulch. Looks better to me.

Of course in AP there are so many variables and details that if some one is expecting to have perfect heads of lettuce 21 days after discovering the idea, then they are set for failure. I've noticed that some people I've shown my AP and Hydroponic systems to like to exaggerate the results when telling others about it. I don't like that approach because it usually sets up unreasonable expectations. We know the benefits of Aquaponics are many but to sell it by exaggeration is just setting up the uneducated for disappointment and then they go badmouthing it saying it doesn't work.

Probably dosed the system with hydroponics chemicals and killed the fish then wrote the whole idea off.

Well, I just recently discovered the major problems that were really slowing plant growth and giving me frustration and set them right.

They are (guess?) the simplest:
* 1 ) low ph (poor buffering)
* 2 ) needed more direct sunlight

Got better plant growth later.
I had been suffering for months trying to fix every other posible problem!

Explainations:
1) I had a small (tiny) egg shell buffer and thought that would give me an assured, guaranteed ph buffering. Nope it didn't.
Now I use egg shells directly under the pump outlet and also crushed concrete in the fish tank.

2) I thought 3pm to 6pm of direct sunlight was sufficient. Hmm not enough! Especially when, for about a whole month most days were bright in the mornings and cloudy in the late evenings.

Now I have 12:30 pm to 6 pm of direct sunlight (the most I can manage right now) and things are so much better already. I would still prefer a full day of sunlight, which means moving my system in the future out of the place behind the house's western wall to somewhere else (roof?).





I did struggle with my system for several months. It's working now. But I never said AP itself was a hoax just because I had difficult days initially and instead worked to solve the problem.

Heh, now if _Joel Malcolm_ had said this then I'd have to schedule a rethink.

I think a lot of us failed first time around. Thats why this forum is so damn important. People can learn from our mistakes.

Perhaps he didn't pee in it enough?

Everybody who has seen my system reckon it looks healthy