This weekend we moved most of our aquaponics system into the light, about two meters right. Such a simple sentence. Deceptively simple. Somehow the scratches, the hefting of gravel and the sheer grunty hard work of it gets smoothed over. Let me tell you a little about it…
Our prototype system was set up in our backyard under an opaque roof adjoining the shed. It was a good place to start, and as we added fish, bacteria and vegetables, it served us well. Over the months however, we realized that we weren’t seeing the results from our beds that we had hoped. My father somewhat drying suggested we were growing a lovely set of miniature vegetables. So we checked what we knew - we checked the ratio of beds to water, we checked the quality of the water, we checked the amount of fish poo to plants. And still, we wondered why we weren’t getting the lush sort of crops that Joel Malcolm and the other members of the Aquaponics community casually talk about. We figured that most of these guys live in Queensland and its lush up there - throw a watermelon seed out your car window and the car behind you has to avoid the watermelons on the highway, its that lush. But apart from the natural fertility of the tropics of Queensland, we wondered why our system was going so slowly.