In the Beginning

[Aaron]

Well, here I am with a fancy aquaponics system that I just built myself. How did I come across the idea of getting into the aquaponics hobby, you may ask... Well it all started a long time ago while I was looking into setting up a hydroponics unit. But, me being the lazy type, I figured it would be too much work always having to take readings of the nutrient levels and feeding it the nutrients manually (I really dislike manual labor). Then one day while day dreaming about how nice it would be to have a garden that just took care of itself and would provide me with a bountiful harvest month after month I came across the term "aquaponics". 

I found that there is minimal work to do after the initial set up, it uses less resources than soil gardens, and provides an environment for plants to grow fast providing me with lots of delicious and healthy food. I thought to myself, "WOW!!! this sounds like it could be right up my alley!!!". So, I decided to dive right in and started buying all the items needed to build my very own mini-aquaponics system. 

I started out with a small fish aquarium for the poopers (AKA nutrient providers, AKA fish), a bin to use for the plants and a few other accessories. I got my little seedlings started and also bought some asparagus and strawberry roots to put into the system. 

So far I'm at about week 2 for some of the plant growth. My asparagus has a few spears that shot out instantly with one of the spears at a whopping 14 inches in length!!! The strawberries were doing a little dance of their own... The leaves suddenly turned blackish in color. It turns out that my pH was too high so I went ahead and tossed in a teaspoon of pH Down. The new leaves are doing much better now! I also have some lettuce and brussel sprouts in there... They don't appear to be growing very fast but I believe that is because in my excitement I put them into the aquaponics system too early before they had a chance to establish a strong root system. They are however healthy looking. Lesson learned, tone down the excitement and increase level of patience.

So I'm sure everyone is just dying to see some pictures, right? Well, you too will have to learn patience while my battery is charging. I'll get some posted as soon as the battery has some juice in her.

Until then, ta-ta and happy aquaponicsing!