Aquaponic Gardening

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Hello everyone I'm trying to get started in aquaponics. Last year I started gardening. My location is pure sand soil and I amended some rows with composted manure, but wasn't enough. I started looking into growing hydroponically as it'll require a lot to make good soil here. I really wanted to go organically though and all the guano's and everything gets rather pricy. Came across aquaponics and decided I wanted to give it a try.

I didn't have all my  research and information or planning before getting pushed to getting an above ground swimming pool for it. Well I ended up with a 15 ft diameter, 4 ft deep pool for this. Now I'm trying to figure out how much area for grow bed and how many fish.

So I planned to dig a pit and put the pool into the ground to help with thermal insulation.

I figure I'll run the pool at 3' deep which gives me a volume of ~530 cubic feet and nearly 4000gallons of water.

7 gallons of water per pound of fish gives ~570 pounds of fish, 456 1.25 pound tilapia

1 square foot of 1ft deep media per 1 pound of fish = 570 square feet of grow bed

Does this sound good so far?

I've still got to build grow beds and not sure what to make them of or how to support the weight. Not sure if I should do 4 or 5 foot wide grow beds.

How many fingerlings would you start up such a system with?

I'm getting a late start and probably in over my head but I've got to get it built up so I can plan the greenhouse to go over it.

Much appreciation,

Devoid

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Hi there.

Read up on fishless cycling.

Are you married to the idea of tilapia?  I would personally recommend Catfish or Bluegill if you get any chilly weather in winter.  Sinking the pool into the ground only gives a small amount of thermal benefit if you are flooding and draining grow beds.

If your pool is tall enough, maybe you should not sink it into the ground but run CHIFT PIST and have the fish tank/pool flow into the grow beds and have grow beds drain into a sump tank where the pump sends the water back up to the pool.  That way you might avoid building stands to hold the grow beds above the pool for draining back and you only have to dig a hole big enough for the sump tank.  But that sump tank would still need to be fairly large to handle the water level fluctuation.

I like to use 100 gallon stock tanks or 1/2 IBC's just sitting on blocks or right on the ground as grow beds.  I like deep grow beds.  You get more filtration for your money.  I'm short, so 3-4' wide on grow beds is plenty or even too much.  I don't recommend lumber and liner for grow beds in termite territory anymore.  But for grow bed width, most liners come in 5-6' wide rolls for the narrow stuff so you want to plan your grow bed size to work with that width remembering to leave a few inches on each side for securing things.

My big system (before it started getting pulled apart) I was starting my stocking about 1 fish per 10 gallons of fish tank and since it was a 2:1 system twice as much grow bed as fish tank, I had about 20 gallons of grow bed for each fish.  I would stock channel catfish fingerlings at about 6-8 inches into the big system (so that was 70 fish into the 700 gallon tank with about 1400 gallons of grow beds) and grow them out for most of the year and start harvesting usually when they were 2-3 lb and by the time we were harvesting the last ones they would be over 6 lb.  I use indexing valves and that system only has about 300 gallons of sump tank but I wouldn't recommend anyone base their system on that set up since it is a bit complicated.

Now you don't have to fully sock the swimming pool, especially if you can't set up enough filtration.  You need to make sure you can pump enough to still turn over almost the volume of the pool each hour to keep it circulated and avoid turbid stagnant areas but you could probably get away with only 1/4 of the filtration and only stock the appropriate amount of fish for the filtration you set up.  (if you do that, it is definitely worth cycling up fishless through so you don't have the long wait with fish to get cycling started.)  Then you can add on more grow beds later.

It might be worth while to set up cage culture in such a large pool to make harvesting the fish easier.

Thank you TCLynx

I'm not sure what bluegill is, I'll look. I don't care for eating catfish at all so prefer tilapia. Maybe if I could legally sell the catfish to make up for lack of personal eating it might be ok.

As for temps, here is weather.com's charts for my area's average

http://www.weather.com/weather/wxclimatology/monthly/graph/76567

It's only april and we've been getting 80+ degree days. On top of putting it into the ground I plan to build a greenhouse around it and doing all I can to collect solar heat, I've already got the aluminum frame. I'm hoping to borrow some solar water heating panels that have been laying around for years in order to help heat the water as a heat sink.

I plan to do a fishless startup cycle, just wondering how many fish I need to stock up after that.

I'll have to read more on CHIFT PIST. From what I saw in brief looking, it shows the pump in the sump pumping into the fish tank, but doesn't show how you get water from fish tank into growbeds. Is it constant flow?

I'm planning on getting a 5000 gph pump with an indexing valve and 3-4 grow beds. That should cycle the 4000gallons through an hour even if there's a couple minutes of downtime between beds with the index valve. I was considering starting with two beds to get started, then build on the other two as the fish grow and hopefully spawn.

Roughly how many fingerlings are in a pound? There's a fish farm a little over an hour away that sales fingerling for $10 a pound and I'm wondering how many pounds I should be starting with.

Thank you

How many fingerlings are in a pound would depend on how big they are when you buy them.

I usually buy my fingerlings for 30-60 cents each with the minimum order being like $30.

For a first season system, I still say 1 fish per cubic foot of grow bed if you are planning on growing the fish out to 1 lb each.  With Bluegill they don't usually get that big so fast so I've stocked more bluegill into a system since we were harvesting them at 1/3 rd of a pound.

So how many pounds of fingerlings should you sock?  Still not sure, how much grow bed will you have to start?  I would probably say get the minimum order or less.  Try 1 lb of fingerlings at first.  If they are tilapia, you may wind up with way more fish than you want due to breeding.

Bluegill are bream and they are good eating fish.  Bluegill and sunfish are the fish most kid fishing seems to revolve around since they seem easy to catch.  They do grow at a varied rate with some fish growing much faster than others.

I'd probably start with nearly 60 cubic feet of grow bed at the least.

Thanks for the info and help

You might call up the fish farm and ask them about how many fingerlings would make a pound of fingerlings.  And use that info to help you decide how many you would get.  Ya probably need to call ahead before making the drive to get fingerlings anyway.

I feel rather stupid. Over thinking so much I didn't even think to talk to the fishery. They aren't very far from me so I should be able to get an idea about whether I can over winter the tilapia in the pool or not.

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