Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Love the "spiral shell" pizza oven! The pizza doesn't look too bad either.

Good on them!

Cheers IanK

I may not be able to suggest a volume for you but I have a few suggestions that may help your system to become self sufficient. I wouldn't go as far as climate because I live in a tropical country thus have very minimal gardening experience in a four season climate.

1) Firstly, determine what you want and the amount that you are able produce. Work out the number of plants you need and when you need to plant them. Do the same with fishes as well.

2) Optimize your growbeds. Growbeds should be optimized to the plants you wish to plant in them; pak choy and lettuce don't belong in a 12" growbed. That way, you have more planting area with the same amount of gravel. You may or may not have to increase the number of growbeds.

3) Staggering your planting and fish stocking is also crucial. More crucial to fish as they take longer to be harvested. A good staggering plan involve several fishtanks (around 4 tanks) that you stock at 3 months interval for example. The reason why people fail at staggering is because they just couldn't wait to get 'in the flow' with the process and get tempted to fill the all tanks with fish and all growbeds with plants. On my system, I only stagger plants because I have only one fish tank. If not I'll stagger the whole thing as well.

4) An extension to staggering is the plant efficiency, most commercial planters replace their pepper plants after their a year old because they stop producing at optimum level. Perhaps this would be a good consideration as well.

Anyway that's about all I can think of now...Good luck!