Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi

My name is Leendert, I am living on a farm in the Karoo with my wife and son. We 'fled' Cape Town when everything lockdown was just a bit intense for some more freedom and fresh air.

I had for a while been wanting to build an aquaponic system, always have loved fish, had all kinds of aquaria etc, although other than some orchids had never grown many plants.

Having some space now I built our system.

We have a 15mx6m Polycarbonate greenhouse that I built for this purpose. At the moment we have 2x 4000l fish tanks, both with 750l conical solids filter, a 220l bio reactor and a 220l small solids filter.

We have 400 fish, red breast tilapia and Mozambique tilapia.

Then we have about 20m2 of growbeds and 50ish Dutch buckets. All the grow media is a rock from a local mine called black wacky.

Everything is going pretty smoothly at the moment, plants grow like mad and the fish are fat and happy.

I have learned many lessons and doubtless will need to learn many many more, so I thought I should join a community where I can maybe give some advice and where I will definitely need to ask for some at times.

Welcome to the forum

Post up some pics of your system.

Thank you, I will as soon as we go take some.

I have a 1.1kw pool pump that looks after my plants that decided to start leaking water last night, so it has been a fun aquaponicy morning.

Replaced it for now with the pump I use to clean my filters, works alright atleast.

Stories like yours are very interesting to read! You're a big lad! I hope everything will work out for you and you will continue to delight yourself with what you love!