Lucy Urban Garden is experimenting with aquaponics!!!!

What is aquaponics?  Aquaponics is a sustainable food production system that combines raising fish with hydroponics in a symbiotic environment.  Everything is working together here! =)

Here is our experimental set up... it all started with this permanent rock fountain we had in our backyard.  For the last three years it was filled with dirt and used by the chickens as one of their many dust baths.  This year after being unsuccessful at moving the thing we thought long and hard about how we could use it other then just using it as a fountain where it just sucks up energy and doesn't produce or give anything back to us.... thats when the idea of aquaponics came in to play.  The bottom half of the fountain will have fish in it, the fish poop will then be pumped up into the raised bed, the roots of the plants will feed off the poop and filter out the water, once the bed is full the bell siphon is triggered which then drains the bed so the roots will not rot, this cycle continues every 15 min.  This type of gardening system uses 10% of the water it takes to run a traditional garden set up with soil.  If this experiments works for us then we will slowly convert the rest of the yard to an aquaponic set up!!!

You dont have to spend hundreds on a set up like this... at least we didn't: We were able to get the pallets, and a 55 gallon drum for free (we shop the FREE Craigs list section all the time, and drive around your neighborhoods, youll be surprised what people leave in their front yards with free signs on them!!).  Our local hydro garden store was nice and discounted the pump and growing medium for us.  Total cost of materials came to about an $80 project. =)

We decided on using clay grow rocks as our growing medium

And Todd figured out how to make a bell siphon that works like a charm!!! He's brilliant =)

We will keep this project updated, currently we are working on cycling the system, which can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a month or more depending on the quality of your water.  To help cycle the system we planted some left over baby pickling cucumber plants and bought some cheapy feeder fish.. 10 for $2.00, we are also testing the waters pH, Ammonia, Nitrite, and Nitrate everyday and keeping record of the changes... 

Baby pickling cucumber plant

The fish