My aquaponic adventure.

Earlier, towards the beginning of the year I decided to partake on a journey concerning aquaponics. Aquaponics is a system of aquaculture where the waste from farmed fish is used to fertilize.

This is a simple diagram of what goes on in an aquaponics environment.

As you can see (though not very well) I used a 25 gallon tank, a concrete mixing bucket, an aquarium air pump with a simple airstone, some gravel for the plants and fish, and 2 shop lights with 75 equivalent CFLs. You can literally pick up almost all of these at your local hardware store. Although the system was pretty simple it worked quite well.

It drained through a sprinkler riser. To which I attached a mesh with a zip tie to ensure no gravel fell through.

I attached a pond pump to the system to pump
through the nutrient dense water. For this I used a threaded 1/2 inch elbow with a threaded fitting to attach some clear vinyl tubing. I used another sprinkler riser to aim the water more efficiently.

For my fish I used a longear sun fish that I caught out of the river near my house. To ensure my success I looked online and researched the waste production of this type of fish.

For plants I used a generic pepper, 2 sweet basils, mint, spearmint, chives, and some cilantro. For unknown reasons one of my cilantros never sprouted, and the one that did never had very large yielding. I believe it was a lack of nutrients that were needed for that exact plant. But over all my plants grew great. My fish grew quite large so I decided to release him back into the network of streams and rivers. And I will attempt to now use it as a hydroponic system. Which is using water as a medium to host roots and provide nutrients.

Please do not be shy, follow, comment, find me on other social media platforms, or tell me what you want to see more of. Im very open for new ideas, hobbies, and people

And until next time your captain Cruz signing off. Salutations