Apartment Aquaponics Project
As you may have seen from other recent blog postings, I’ve recently been checking out epicurious.com. I happened to check their blog a couple weeks ago when they had a brief posting about aquaponics. Aquaponics refers to the growing of plants in water (hydroponics), together with fish (aquaculture) in a closed system, where the fishes’ waste feeds the plants, which in turn clean the water for the fish. It struck me as a pretty nifty idea, not to mention a fun project and practical justification for having a fish tank and fountain (both of which I like).
So I began shopping around for kits and such, but eventually realized that it shouldn’t be too difficult just to make my own. After reading up quite a bit, I finally came up with a design idea, bought the parts, and in a week’s time went from buying the first parts to adding the fish and plants. The system has been running for a few days now and both plants and fish look healthy, so no disasters yet. Time will tell if this turns out to be a productive herb garden (moreso than my traditional attempt which was rather unimpressive).
