Backyard aquaponics: DIY system to farm fish with vegetables

i originally put up the greenhouse to start seedlings for our main garden i was just keeping plants in there and decided to add a large water tank to act as a heat sink to help maintain the temperature in the greenhouse and then from there the mosquitoes started breeding in there so somebody said throw some fish in there to take care of the mosquitoes so i did that and then of course you know the fish were peeing and pooing in the water and i had to figure out some way to keep that water clean and i just started looking around on the internet and stumbled across this whole group of people that were doing aquaponics i can open this up i took everything out of the greenhouse rebuilt it with different tanks and made up the grow beds and converted the entire greenhouse to an aquaponics system like i instantly got hooked once i realized how well everything grew in there so the whole process works where this tank houses a bunch of goldfish i don't grow any edible fish in here right now with aquaponics people like to grow tilapia and they are warm water fish they really like being above 75 80 degrees and here in new england we can't keep it that warm at all a lot of people will grow trout or perch in the colder areas they have an automatic feeder which they get fed a few times a day aquaponics is very simple it's just we have the fish and they basically excrete ammonia through their gills as their waste and that ammonia travels in the water and from this tank it then gets pumped into these various grow beds this particular grow bed here is filling there's a naturally occurring bacteria that converts the ammonia into nitrites and then the nitrates and then the nitrates are absorbed by the plants as a fertilizer so it's a whole natural process that breaks it down and then once the plants absorb that there's now clean water in the system and then from the grow beds it then drains down into this uh sump tank here and then gets pumped back into uh the fish tanks again so it's a whole circular system and what the fish always are swimming in clean water sorry it's gonna get loud for a second the water is just draining out of one of the grow beds and then it gets pumped back into this fish tank that we have here this grow bed will fill up about once every hour and a half and what will happen is the water level in here will rise and for this container here the water level rises then it will overflow into this cup when the cup gets heavy enough it will pull down this lever and it will lift a plunger that's down in the bottom and it will then drain this grow bed out this particular grow bed has a this bell siphon in it and you can see down in here the water the current water level with the aquaponics or even with standard hydroponics you can't keep the roots submerged in water all the time because they will start to rot so it's important to make sure that they're in a moist material but they still need to be able to get air to their roots so by flooding and draining a system like this it becomes a very good way of not drowning your plants in this bed i have this is a crushed granite using stone is is very popular because it's one of the cheapest way to do it but it's also extremely heavy and then there's this expanded shell growing media that it's really easy to work with if you needed to pull out a plant to replace it they come right out you can see with this pepper plant some of the roots are exposed here but the media stays wet all day long so it doesn't hurt the roots at all being real up close like that and if you disturb them it's easy enough just to cover them back up again but when this plant is done you just take it by the base and easily and pull it right out so you open up a new spot and then you can plant a new plant right in the same area so you don't have to spend a lot of time rototilling or hoeing any of this type of media these are just some small carrots here's a little weed that you know we still get weeds so you have to weed everything once in a while but a lot less weeds than a traditional garden that's one of the nicest things about growing in here is there are very few weeds they have to deal with another weed right here you can see they come right out the whole root and everything comes out so it's not going to grow back again now easy to weave very easy to weed and then on the on the back side in here i've made up these strawberry towers which the water comes through the top and then just trickles down all the way down to the bottom so for a very small amount of square footage this is about five or six square feet it's easy enough to grow 50 or 60 plants without any problem so by going vertical and just working it this way it's a very cost effective way if you're tight on space to grow a lot of plants this is a hobby greenhouse that i purchased something like this can be placed almost in anybody's yard in an urban suburban area so down under here is our filthy computer that monitors all the different options that are going on this monitors indoor temperatures the outdoor temperature the water temperature the amount of light coming into the building this greenhouse it's it's fully automated on occasion they get stuck so i have to make them go i'm a relatively lazy gardener so i don't want to have to come out every day and open up my vents and feed the fish so that's why i made up a controller unit that monitors the temperature in here it will automatically open and close the vents it monitors of course the water temperature so it can feed the fish and then it also keeps track of all the statistics in the greenhouse here and it publishes that information out onto the internet so while i'm at work i can actually log in monitor and see what's happening in here and make changes to any of the settings if i need to typically you'll find the aquaponic people are home hobbyists they'll put put their system together using blue barrels pond liners you name it if it can hold water and stone they'll use it to make an aquaponics system and all these grow beds they're all homemade i just welded some pipe together and filled them with a rubber pond liner some people can make them indoors i have an indoor system here also so this is just an indoor system that i came up with and it has a traditional 50-gallon fish tank and down underneath is the sump tank that the water drains into and then it gets pumped back up into the upper tray which i have some lettuce growing in and some carrots so it basically acts as a great filtration system for a typical fish tank normally with tank this size you would have to have a you know a charcoal filter installed and have that running and with a fish this size we were going through a set of filters every week this is some lettuce that's growing and some carrots you can grow almost any type of any vegetable in indoors also i just bought some half inch tubing this is just a standard pond pump that i bought i think they only cost about 15 or 20 dollars these are just some of those big storage containers that i purchased it holds water and the same one with this top one but i just took the same container and i cut it in half because i only needed around eight inches or so for the grow bed depth i just cut it off and then i reattached the the rim to it to clean up the edges a little bit and then just you know filled it in this is all expanded shale you can see it stays nice and moist so the roots never dry out this one has the the bell siphon inside just like the ones that i have outdoors there she is wanna see the fish look at that fish is that the biggest fish you've ever seen you can see the water doesn't stay 100 clear she definitely produces a lot of waste but this is a pretty good example of a small system that anybody could grow if you're in the city and want to have one in your apartment just set up a shelf and if you don't want to do artificial lighting if if you can set the thing up by uh by a window the plants will grow perfectly fine this has a whole bunch of aphids on it so you know you sort of sort of squish them off and that's probably the most of the maintenance is a little bit of bug control you can't use any type of insecticides and especially the chemical insecticides because if that gets into the water it will definitely harm your fish everything in here is organically grown there's no outside chemicals introduced into the system at all it's basically fish food and the fish waste water that's feeding the plants with all the e coli outbreaks a lot of people are like oh you have fish waste that's going into your plants well fish are cold-blooded so e coli doesn't come from cold-blooded animals like a cow or any type of manure so the whole system is really clean you can drink this water i i probably wouldn't do it myself but you know it's very very clean water i think a lot of people just don't realize how things are grown on farms if they've seen huge lettuce factories where they just flood the fields with cow manure to fertilize them they just don't realize how much animal waste or chemical waste or chemical nutrients which is a petroleum product with a lot of them are spread on on the food a lot of times i'll bring cucumbers into work and people get all excited to see them and they ask did you grow them in your your system in that fish poop i was like yeah i did but you know they're nice and clean and they aren't going to kill you with the cucumbers they do extremely well in here i have two plants that will produce i think last year the two plants produced around 250 275 cucumbers i find this to be uh much more appetizing once you start thinking about it on how how you grow your plants

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 2,790,158

Keywords: aquaponics, DIY aquaponics, backyard aquaponics, fish farming, vegetable farming, organic farming, backyard farming, backyard greenhouse, DIY greenhouse, indoor aquaponics system, aquaponics kit, greenhouse kit, organic vegetables, hobby farmer, hobby greenhouse, hobby aquaponics, tilapia

Id: VBspR2p0YYM

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 22 2011