Aquaponics

I've been looking into raising my own fish to eat. I have bumped into the idea of aquaponics before, but I thought it was a very high tech arrangement that needed heaps of electricity, a special greenhouse and so on.

I've discovered that you can do it simply with the amount of electricity it takes to run two pumps, and they need only run intermittently. One aerates the fish pond, and the other pumps water from the pond into a vegie garden bed, and it flows from there back into the pond. The vegie garden bed has no soil in it - instead it has gravel or clay pebbles. As the water runs through it, the plants take up the nutrients in the water - so any fish poo and wee is cleaned out, and what returns to the pond is nice, clean water. Meanwhile, apparently, the vegies grow fantastically, with all this water and nutrition.

A system like this is particularly handy if you live in a very dry place (we get shocking droughts here, though the last one has just broken, thank god), because you can grow a significant amount of vegetables and fish, using just a bucket of water a week (to top up the pond). That's pretty good, if you ask me.

Unfortunately, the systems you can buy seem to be very expensive (you'd need to grow and eat a hell of a lot of fish to payback the price of most ready-made systems), and extremely ugly. This is what put me off in the first place.

However, I got newly inspired when I saw this gorgeous pond (photo above) made by Ecolicious. The vegie beds, instead of being hideous plastic trays on stands, are recycled bath tubs from the tip, surrounding a pretty timber deck. Rather than installing an expensive plastic fish tank, the Ecolicious crew dug into the ground and used a pond liner and rocks.

The garden in front of our house, which we look at every time we look out the windows, is quite pretty, but it's taken years to work out which few plants will tolerate growing there. I'm not sure what's wrong - the soil must be absolutely shocking, though I've added compost from time to time. it's shady, and almost everything I put in there dies. It's a very inefficient use of space, considering that I'm managing a very high level of food production from most of the rest of my garden. However.. now I'm dreaming... what if I dug it up, put in a fish pond (it seems we humans love looking at water - look at our obsession with buying beach front and river front properties) and some recycled bathtub grow beds?

Jesse assures me he'll be happy to go fishing in our pond to catch our dinner. There's another great bonus to this idea. The front garden is home to our rabbit cage, and we let the rabbit hop around sometimes. But her angora fur gets rather damaged by all the dirt and mulch. A rock garden with pebbles instead of soil will be perfect for her - I could grow her food there, and she can self-serve without me worrying about her fur getting dirty.

But dare I take on yet another project? I'm always trying to slow down....