Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello my name is Dan.
There's this 99' movie Office Space wherein two dudes were talking about what to do with their lives if they had a million dollars. The answer to that question is supposed to be your "calling" or the one you should pursue. Here's a clip.



Well yeah... aside from two chicks. I'd farm, farm and farm! I enjoy growing food. I love the manual labor behind it as well as building things from scratch. There's sort of an existential zen i get when i create.
But the reality is how will i make a living doing that?

Previously i had a small organic lettuce production going on but it didn't work out. I was producing 50-70kg of lettuce every week till i decided to stop for various reasons.

Now i have built a "friendly" micro system on our parking lot to see how it'll go. I'd like to test the waters first before making radical business decisions. I want to make this my living if i can.
I have lots of lettuce seeds from my previous venture and decided to use that. I am around a month in and the plants are doing so-so(you be the judge). Two weeks left before harvest.

Welcome to the forum

Welcome Dan!

So the system has only been running for a month? Is it cycled yet?

I had the water running for around two weeks before i placed the fish and the plants. I already inoculated the system with some home made beneficial bacteria. I also mixed in 10-15ml of household ammonia to start the system but found out that nitrate, nitrite didn't show until a few days after the fish started eating. Right now i have .25-.5 ammonia, but the NO2 and NO3 are hard to accurately gauge because i bought cheap test kits I think NO2 is around 1 to 1.5 and NO3 is around 5-20. I should have gotten the API brand!

All i know is that the tilapias are eating, few goldfish in the through are eating and the lettuce seem okay compared to soil grown lettuce i did a few months back.