Overview of System, originally uploaded by brunom.
This is our bed in December 2007. We’ve got a prominent pumpkin growing up there in the front, plus some established tomatoes you can see in the back ground, and a few marigolds. In the big fiberglass bed on the right you can see some little seedlings we’ve just planted, including parsley, cherry tomatoes in yellow, orange and red, eggplant, lettuce, small leeks and basil.
The aquaponics system in our backyard is growing some great crops and they are increasing in size at a phenomenal rate. Since we’ve added the larger growbed and moved everything under a sunnier spot, it seems to have made a huge difference.
You can see the whole thing on the picture. The large, white, growbed, has two different type of lettuces, mignonette and danyelle. The second set is from greenharvest.com.au and is an organic seed. I am looking forward to be able to harvest those and eat them (hopefully we’ll be able to do that before the bloody caterpillars eat everything) 
Towards the sides of the growbed, we have eggplants, zucchini, tomato (all the plants on the side of the bed). Finally, at the end we have some parsley, coriander and a chilli plant.
It’s worth remembering that this system is a prototype, i.e. when we started it we had no idea what we were doing and we thought “we are intelligent people, we can figure it out” and only after a lot of research, help from really friendly folks at the backyard aquaponics forums and trial and error, is that we are were we are.
The main challenge that we are facing at the moment are the pests, both animal as well as funghi … it’s getting warmers and humid and all sorts of creatures seem to thrive as much as our plants (well, mainly because we are preparing a substantial banquet for all of them). So far, the only way we’ve been dealing with all the pests has been by spraying dilluted seasol … it’s a very tricky thing to do in an aquaponics system, you can’t just use garlic spray like you find at Bunnings or things like that as they contain soap and other components that you don’t want to end up in the water where the fish live … I will be researching a lot more about how to fight all these pests over the next few weeks as I want to eat our veggies and not leave it to the caterpillars and other bugs to eat them for me 