Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I know this is going to sound bad but for 'putting down' large cichlids and goldfish and find picking them up placeing a pair of big sharp chunky skissors in their mouth and cutting between eyes works very well. Done correctly you cut the heart and brain in half. Not as surgical as a brain spike but it sure double kills fish rather well.

Just like to give some kudo's on this setup.
It's dam well done and ya, has me room mates thinking along wif me now.
awesome work.

Just goes to show there is more than one way to kill a fish.

Just like to give some kudo's on this setup.
It's dam well done and ya, has me room mates thinking along wif me now.
awesome work.

The design has worked extremely well since its inception and has produced well in only 5 months. Very easy to maintain and has been viewed by well over 1000 people personally, not to mention the Garden Gurus and soon to be Gardening Australia as well as the American Aquaponics Journal and Grass Roots magazine.. It has been a great honour as well as a pleasure to be involved with the first Backyard Aquaponics System and I have no doubt that there will be many more to follow. Joel has a very sound knowledge of what is required to establish an aquaponic system.

Ive got the grass roots magazine... my Head od dept wanted a Photocopy of it Faye...

How must veggies have you been able to produce so far?

Ya I have seen a good 50 ways to kill fish in my time. Skissors in the mouth is fast if done properly. Never been a fan of chilling them to death, clove oil is no good for food fish, brain spike can be fumbled... only prob with skissors is it leaves the fish looking a bit overkilled.

The basic premis for aquaponics is just so obvious really though. When you have a really healthy filter on a fish tank and you only ever clean it out in a bucket of water from the aquarium (never under the tap!) it fully colonises with the bacteria you need to transform rotting toxic chemicals to less toxic plant/algae food. The thing is a healthy bit of filter sponge, well it smells like healthy veggie garden dirt after a rainstorm.
So growing a veggie garden in the bio-accumulated nutrients trapped in the mechanical and biological filter media as well as in the water of a fish pond, if you like, you can eat the fish as well.

Ya I think the design is just so efficient and simple... but simple thru optimisation. Theres a fair bit going on behind the scenes and I imagine that you Faye are probably a pretty good gardener too. But yep it's an idea whose time has come. Imagine setting up 1000 of them on a chunk of desert in tropical NT.... could feed a whole town. The whole gov spending a million dollars a day on advertising... if they spent a million dollars a day setting up veggie gardens wif fish instead da people would luv em eh.

End of the day thats a nice garden you have, would get a lot of trucks off the road and a lot of people eating better if we all had one in our backyard.

Mmmm...clouds part, rays of sun shine down on the land.

How must veggies have you been able to produce so far?

Well I haven't weighed anything but a crop of broccoli is in the freezer, plus all the trout, continuous picking of silverbeet, parsley, cos lettuce, english spinach. The cherry tomatoes and carrots are just starting and soon I will turn the beetroot into a relish for summer salads. That is 5 months worth and we started in winter, not bad eh!
There is also dill and celery, mizuna, bok choy and assorted others. At the present moment I have started collecting seed and adding more seedlings for the summer crop.

That celery just looks sooo good and I'm not even a very big fan of celery.... lol

If all the trout are in the freezer what is in the fish tank?

I thought I read everything but must have missed that bit.

That is a lot of vegetables, you must be very healthy :-)

At the minute I have been on the phone checking out fingerling availability although there are some goldfish in the fingerling tank keeping things going temporarily.

what was the water temp? I would have thought the trout could have got thru a bit longer.

The temperature was 23 degrees (and the fish were acting funny) and the weekend we were heading away was tipped to be 30 degrees, so rather than return to dead fish I harvested. The temperature this morning was down to 16 degrees.The weather has been all over the place this last month.

hmmm, definately would have done what you did then.

Well Faye, i have just read this thread from the beginning. It is truly inspirational and well done to all involved. It gives me some confidence to expect that I should get away nicely when my plastic goes on in a couple days. If my stuff grows half as well as yours we will be very happy.

Great work.

Some photos I meant to put on earlier.

Bu wait there's more