A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners

Sharing the AP addiction in FL's Panhandle

Hi, I spent a few weeks, helping one of the members here, get a start on their larger system. Liz Tyner is the listed member here and her husband, David.

They did the smart thing, and had built a small system to get the hang of things. They have it in a small glass green house that David had built.

We started off by re-vamping it some. We changed out the bathtub/fish tank with a deeper one....

We replaced the small media bed with 3 of the mixing tubs that HD sells. Here's Dave working on a shelf for them...

Here's a shot of the media tubs. We added a few plants. Plus we added some lettuce mix seeds, which sprouted before I left.

You can see the NFT running along the wall above the tubs. After increasing the fish load, and adding a good shot of maxi-crop with iron, the plants were really looking happy....

Next, we started to work on the large system. Dave had already started the frame work for the fish house. Next to it, he had also started a green house.

The first thing was to level the ground in the greenhouse. His neighbor was nice enough to bring over his tractor and get us pretty well level.....

Once it was close to level, we made sure it was packed well....

Dave worked on building the troughs.....

We bought some olive barrels in the local area and I started building the swirl filter, the bio filter and running the pipe underground....

We worked on getting the liners into the first two troughs.....

The rafts will hold 2 gallon pots with tomatoes in them. The bottom of the pots will just touch the water, so they can wick up water into the soil mix.

The tomatoes that I have planted that way, at Sahib Aquaponics, seem to do really well.

Here, we're doing a test fit of the rafts....