Discover Organic Gardening The Easy Way With Aquaponics
Most of us have been taught that planting in the ground is the way to grow food. That is how we have been growing food for thousands of years. Mostly because up until now, that is the only way we have know how to do it. Growing plants in the ground is actually a difficult way to grow food and in many ways we are working against nature.
From soil conditioning, digging, tilling, it can be back breaking work. And the weeds, pulling weeds is an endless task. Then there are the garden pests like gophers, slugs, snails and insects. And most garden plants need a lot of water to be dumped on the ground through the whole growing season, in order to get the small percentage of it that they actually use.
No matter how you look at it, gardening in the ground is a lot of work. And most of the work is down on the ground in dirty conditions. But there is an easier and more efficient way to grow plants that eliminates all of that. More and more gardeners are switching to aquaponics, and more non gardeners are becoming gardeners, since aquaponics makes it so much easier and practical for more people to grow their own food.
Aquaponics is a growing system that is similar to hydroponics, but is all organic and eliminates the major problems with hydroponics. Aquaponics does this by combining hydroponics with aquaculture (raising fish). The major problem with aquaculture is what to do with all the waste material that fish produce. Aquaponics solves that problem.
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It just happens that fish wastes are full of the nutrients that plants need to grow. And plants are great at removing these substances and filtering the fish water. With the filtration taken care of by the plants, fish are very easy to grow, and are very efficient at producing protein. With aquaponics, you can produce both fresh organic fish and produce, with much less work than traditional gardening alone, and in much less space.
In this system, fish are kept in a tank, very similar to the way people keep fish in a common home aquarium. Instead of pumping the water through a mechanical filter, the water is pumped through the grow bed. Roots can be grown directly in the water or in a medium, such as gravel or clay pellets. With the water, rich in nutrients from the fish wastes, delivered directly to the roots, plants can put on amazing growth. And it’s all organic so the vegetables they produce are known for being garden quality.
No soil is used, so you eliminate the digging, tilling and need for fertile soil. Since you are not dumping water on the ground and wasting most of it, this type of system uses only about 2% of the water used in traditional farming. There are no weeds, no gophers or most of the hassles of ground gardening.
Just keep the fish fed, the water circulating and the aeration flowing and the system will mostly take care of itself. It is common to power the air and water pumps with solar panels, And many people like to grow their own fish food. A great advantage of growing tilapia is, they will eat just about anything you feed them.
If you want to eliminate all the extra work and expense of growing plants in the ground, aquaponics is the way to go. You can grow more in less space and in less time, and it is all organic.