Aquaponics is basically a fully sustainable system allowing you to grow veggies and harvest fish for your personal consumption, and/or on a commercial level to sell to local restaurants and grocery stores. Now a days it seems we constantly here about more and more  fruits and veggies being recalled due to bacteria etc. More people are eating at restaurants that use locally grown greens and veggies now known as farm to fork style.

The biggest reason again is to know you are getting foods with less chemicals and pesticides and are certified organic. AS of now there are very few aquaponic certified organic farms in the US, but that is rapidly changing as many are realizing the benefits, cost savings, and ability to grow large quantities of food in a very small setting. For more in depth information you can go to: friendlyaquaponics, or aquaponicsresource (same place the pics on this page came from) or lookup other sites as we did to get a little more information, we also watched lots of videos on youtube. and will be videoing our own journey, and you can subscribe to our channel if you wish to see our videos. As of this writing we are just getting ready to start our first set of gardens.

The basic design we are using is this. A grow bed for our veggies on top of a container that houses the fish. In our system we will be ( I think) using

Trout or possibly perch. we wanted bluegill, or salmon but from what we have read they require colder water and that may pose a problem for the plants. We did look at a few different DYI set ups, and all looked pretty easy to build, but when we ran across the 2 IBC tanks for free, that sealed the deal for us.

So our basic structure will have approx 15 – 20 fish, and we are going to start off with what I have in my garden (transplanting) Tomatoes, bell, and hot peppers. and we will add in some lettuce, Spinach (maybe some broccoli (ewww)) and herbs such as: Green mint, Oregano, Basil, and Rosemary. I have heard Cilantro does not do to well in the actual ponics garden, so I am going to find away to make that happen (I love fresh cilantro on about everything – including tacos)! the picture on the right is the basic design that we are using. and eventually will make it look a little more aesthetically appealing.