Aquaponics is essentially the growth of vegetation, mainly leafy greens and vegetables by circulating and transforming the effluent of fish, typically Tilapia, into assimilable food for the vegetables. It's an exciting alternative agriculture technique that is becoming an interest of agriculturalists world wide. The terrific thing about it is that it requires very little water topping off to keep the system viable and as well has the capacity for high production yield. It's something that is great for places suffering from conditions of drought and subsequent food shortage.
When I was in my husband's country of Senegal, located in the Sahel of Africa, a very droughty locale, I decided that I would learn how to make, sustain and replicate the systems in different parts of the world such as Senegal where I think it could be of great benefit.
So this is the first Post in a Series, Aquaponics at Home, A-Z. We want to detail our experience here building and putting together a rudimentary system, just to show how cheaply and simply such a system can be put together just for ones own family and to learn how to maintain it in general.
Below are some images of our 1st step in this process of preparing the Aquaponics system...
Step 1:
Basically I decided to start from seed some brocolli, collards and lettuce. They all do well as seedlings in colder weather which we are starting to have here in Georgia so that is why I chose them. We decided to experiment with a couple of start mediums. One are the peat plugs I bought at the Hydroponics store and some Organic seed start mix. Both have already begun germinating after 2 days. When they get to a nice size I will throw my little florescent light on them to push them into becoming nice little seedlings.
