Aquaponics.  This is my latest brainstorm.  As if I needed more hobbies and things to be involved with here on the Pearson farm, right?  For those of you that don't know what aquaponics is all about, I will give you a crash course.  You may be familiar with the term "hydroponics."  That is, growing vegetables and other plants in a water-based nutrient solution.  The problem has been that the plants produce waste products, and they use up the nutrients, so the water has to be renewed, and there's a lot of waste, and it's expensive to replace the nutrient solution.  Aquaponics solves a lot of those problems.  You raise fish in a tank.  The fish produce waste, the waste water is pumped over growing beds that grow plants.  The plants, and the microbes in the growing beds, and the worms in the growing beds utilize the waste products from the fish waste to produce vegetables.  The water is cleansed in the process, which then goes back into the fish tank, clean.  The water is completely recycled, except for what little evaporates.  The only thing that has to be added is the feed that is given the fish, since the plants live off of the fish waste.

Bathtub aquaponics.  The fish are in the tubs underneath.  The veggies live in the ones on top.  The water is pumped from the fish tanks to the grow beds on top, which then drains back down to the fish tanks underneath.

If you live in a tropical environment, you can do it this way.  But, not in Missouri.  Here, the weather is only warm enough to grow fish and plants for six months of the year.  The rest of the time you have to grow them indoors.  Therefore, the freezer.  The freezer, you ask?  Yup.  An old, broken-down chest freezer.  Doesn't work any more, but the insulation is great.  Which means that it holds the water temperature inside really well.  It's an 18 cubic foot chest freezer, which means it will hold about 100 gallons of water very nicely, and with two 300-watt aquarium heaters it will hold its temperature of 85 degrees year-round with very little electricity input.

Tilapia tank.  It may look like a chest freezer, but it's actually a tilapia fish tank for aquaponics.

The plan is to put two grow beds outdoors and grow veggies outside during the six months of warm weather, and then have two grow beds indoors and grow veggies indoors during the six months of cold winter weather.  You may ask, why bother to keep it going during the winter?  Why not just shut it down during the winter?  The answer to that is, that it takes 8-12 months for the fish to reach eating size.  If you start with baby fish in May when the weather gets warm, by the time the weather gets cold in October the fish won't be big enough to eat.  They would need another 4-6 months to get big enough to reach plate size.  Tilapia are the fastest to grow.  Catfish are even slower to grow. 12-18 months to reach full size.  If you let the water get cold, they stop growing.  They don't die, but they don't get any bigger.  So, that means it takes even longer.  The other option would be to buy bigger fish to start with, but then if you are going to do that, you might as well just go to the store and buy fish to eat.  The whole point of this is to have a whole system of growing fish and vegetables year round to grow and eat.


Barrel aquaponics.  I will be doing my barrel aquaponics indoors like this.

The barrels hold the gravel which is the grow beds for the plants.  The tank at the back holds the water from the fish tank, which flushes through the grow beds when the tank gets full.

This is more like what the outdoors grow beds will look like, except that the flush tank will be on top, at the far end.

The fish tank (the chest freezer) is inside the workshop, and the plumbing will run through the wall of the workshop to the outdoor grow beds.  Then, during the winter, I will drain all the water out of the outside grow beds, and switch everything to the inside grow beds.