My Aquaponics in Arizona - YouTube

Sweet Banana, Green and Jalapeno Peppers

     Saturday I added the breeding tank underneath the grow bed and three pepper plants!  

 I've got the sweet banana pepper, a green bell and a jalapeno plant getting used to their new location.  The heirloom tomato is doing really well growing new leaves and branches.  Growing a few buds as well!  My banana pepper came with three buds on it so hopefully they don't drop off and I can get some peppers soon! I harvested the red bell pepper off to let the plant focus of getting it's leaves back and growing larger.  The pepper was bruised and dried out on top anyway.  I lost my onion due to being too deep in the water.  I cut a tip off to taste it and the next days later It started wilting a lot.  I was curious and was pulling it up to see how deep it was and the whole top just came off.  The stock was just a mushy jelly.  I was experimenting with some baby carrots that turned out to be like the mushy onion. I planted them half in the water with just their tops showing I checked them when I checked the onion.  Live and learn, work on that green thumb!

 I went to Lowes's and got a 50 gallon tote to build this breeding tank it's kinda flimsy I had to zip tie the lid on for a support to keep it together.  I hope it lasts a while.  I had a problem with the tank filling too quickly, and I spent all night sunday trying to figure out a way to regulate the water flow into the tank while still having the siphon work normally. I ended up with what you see in this picture above with some of the water going off into the tank and a majority just going into the sump.  The water in the tank is being replaced about every three hours with this set up. Now I'm waiting for these guys bellow to grow a bit larger so I can start breeding.  I put a couple 4" PVC pipes 6" long to give them somewhere to hide from each other.  They seem to be constantly chasing each other around.

Self Sustainable Living

Urban farming is growing rapidly.  Aquaponics is an amazing way to do that. Watch this video and see their story and learn from what they're doing that you can implement at your home and share with your community. It's like homesteading in a sense that the goal is to be off the grid and produce your own food sustainable but stay in the city rather than off in the woods some where.  This uses less water, it's organic, it's character building and there are so many ways to benefit from running a system like this.

                              

Garden Pool in Mesa, Arizona

Garden Pool is a non profit organization in the McClung's family backyard.  They bought a house and the pool was empty and they did not want to fix it so they decided to turn it into a large green house with a pond in the deep end. They give classes on many different topics such as: what to grow, how to grow it, how to harvest, what works, what doesn't.  They are also making efforts to teach community members how to grow their own food! Here are some pictures of my duckweed and string algae production.

                                Trying to get some string algae to grow to feed the Tilapia

                                I propped the shade cloth up to get some breeze flowing through
                                and to shade the walls from the sun.  The're acting like a furnace
                                radiating heat.

                                My grow media cubic feet bio filter to gallons of water is: 10 cubic
                                feet of grow media to about 85 gallons of water(25-30 gallon
                                sump/grow bed plus 55 gallon fish tank)
                                7.48 gallons = 1 cubic foot
                                85 gallons needs to have a minimum of 11.36 cubic feet. This is a 1:1 ratio.
                                If we say that I only need to filter the fish tank water of 55 gallons then,
                                55 gal to 7.35 cubic feet
                             

Five Tilapia, Duckweed and String Algae

Today I was searching for aquaponic groups in Mesa and I found Garden Pool. They were featured on the news a while back because they turned an empty pool into a green house with a pond in the deep end.  I got to check it out today when I bought the Tilapia and plants from them.  I got them at 5:00 pm and have had them in a five gallon bucket this whole time letting the water temp slowly rise and periodically adding some of my aquaponic water to their water.  It's been 7 hours, the fish have been snacking on duckweed and having a bubble bath.  The 27 feeder fish that I was trying to put in my system all died in three days.  I put the bag of fish into my fish tank to let the water temp match up and it changed too quickly killing all of them rather quickly.  So hopefully these fish are as resilient to changes in temperature and water quality as they're supposed to be. 

My camera battery is died and I cannot find the charger... I really wanted to show you the changes I've made to grow the string algae and duckweed.  

Please continue to follow my blog and +1 me!  Thank you for reading!  Also, please follow the link on the top to Garden Pool.org!