Get your feet wet!

Start a Aquaponic Garden.

Aquaponics is fast becoming the new way to garden (even if it is as old as the pyramids)
By growing veggies and fish in the same closed system you feed the fish and the fish feed your plants.  You get much faster growth from the plants because everything the plants need to thrive is always at optimal levels and available to the plants.

My single barrel system consists of using two haves of a 50 gallon Food grade barrel, making a 25 gallon fish tank and a grow bed that has 12 square feet of growing area.  With a pump to circulate the water and the built in worm farm, it is a high quality system to get into Aquaponics that is easy to setup and start gardening.

By adding a worm farm to the system we've introduced the means to add the micro-nutrients that hydroponic systems either neglect and everyone wonders why the tomatoes are tasteless. Or pay big money for chemicals to add in extra nutrients to get some of the taste back into their produce.  Just feed the worms with plant scraps from your kitchen that already contain the nutrients in a plant usable form.  No more wondering what type of chelated iron should be used for what PH level.

Order a single barrel system for $300 today and get your Auqaponic Garden Started.  Then add more grow area.  The grow containers are very modular and can be easily combined into a bigger system, or added to an existing system of a different type.

Day one, Other side.

Day one, Setup and transplanted

From day one you can start seeds or add transplants to the growbed.


You can order this system Here
Single Barrel Aquaponic System

Get Your Feet Wet!













Day 1


Day 9


Day 13


Day 20


Day 25


Day 28

Now I have it over a barrel!

So I wanted to go outside with my gardening this year and decided to put together a small aquaponic system.

Since we are still renting I wanted it to be modular and easy to move.

I wanted a small footprint, but I wanted to be able to grow some bigger veggies.  

My mom had four blue barrels she had given to me from when my stepfather was planning to do an aquaponics system. One of the barrels was even already cut open on one side so that it would make a nice tank.  My step father had been planning to cut the barrels vertically and make the more traditional clamshell style grow beds, but I didn't want the extra cost and fuss with having to make a rigid frame to keep the sides from bowing out.  I had even been thinking about cutting the ends into shorter tubs and making a vertical garden more like my indoor garden is configured.  But in the end I decided with the extra cost of the much bigger PVC  needed for building towers, and the fact that I really wanted to be able to plant larger plants so I wanted open space above the growing beds.  

So now back to thinking about my design considerations, if I go with the clamshell design I get almost twice as much grow area but then I would still have to build a rigid frame.

If I cut the barrels in half horizontally then I'll only end up with about six square foot growing area using both halves......  unless I used the sides too! 

I had previously seen a few projects where people had cut pockets in the sides of barrels and made Garden Towers or by adding sprinklers inside and making it into a aeroponic system.  By putting in the pockets I am adding an additional 9 square feet to each half of the barrel, giving me a total growing area of 24 square feet, quadrupling my grow area.  

Nice, I think I'm good with that!

And I still have two more barrels I can add in.  

So what do you think?

My Vertical Gardens

Over the past few months I have been working away at making my vertical garden work.  I have made two of the smaller systems on the right in the photo but I had been seeing some problems keeping some plants alive.  One of the problems I was thinking was that I had been running these smaller systems on a constant flow.  I tried to get a bit of a lag in the bottom bowls by building bell siphons in the top bowls.  But I was thinking that still may not have been enough time to drain and that the roots were still staying too wet.  Another possible problem was that the bowls were just to shallow to have good root development.  

Next comes the bigger system.  I decided to work on both of these possible problems in the next version.  I made the these bowls from the the bottoms of five gallon buckets.  Each bowl is almost a square foot of planting area.  So this tower has almost three times the planting area of the smaller ones.  And the depth is about three times deeper than the previous bowls.  

I used a submersible pump instead of a air lift, mostly because I happened to have it on hand.  I set the pump on a timer to run for 15 minutes out of every 3 hours.  I haven't decided if that is optimal yet or not but it seems to be doing well so far.  I am figuring that there is a sweet spot around there some place that gives the roots a chance to breath and cycling the water long enough for biofilter action to take place to keep the system running and the fish happy.

Another change I made was to use Coco Coir as the main growing medium.  I used some of the hydroton and lava rocks I harvested from the smaller systems to add a filter bed at the bottom of each bowl and also to kick start the bio-environment along.   The one thing I like about the Coco is that it is easy to start seeds in.  Plants that I started in the hydroton always seemed a bit precarious until they actually got their roots established a bit.  The one thing I don't like about the Coco is that it stains the water at first.  I have done maybe four partial water changes but the water still has a orange tint to it.  Hopefully it will clear up in a few more weeks.

Already though I have been able to harvest some greens for sandwiches and I used some rosemary, sage and thyme to give the turkey some special touches :-)

This is where I am so far.  Anyone have any suggestions?