A little history…
My dad used to tell me about his childhood, growing up in LLandudno, Wales (UK). He was ten years old when Hitler ordered Germany to bomb the large cities in England. Granddad’s house, named Tresco, was situated at the top of a hill with many surrounding farms – mostly dairy farms. My granddad, John Richard Graber II, was the school headmaster at Bangor Boys School. During the war, there was of course food rationing. Times were very difficult and you had to make do the best you could. I think we are all feeling that pinch today.
Granddad built a greenhouse on the side of the house and grew tomatoes. The main reason he built the greenhouse was due to an accident. My grandma had to go outside the back door across a cement walkway along the side of the house to get coal for the fireplace. One winter, the walk had frozen with ice and she fell, hurting herself. So the greenhouse was built to cover the walkway to make it safe during the winter months and served as a way to raise veggies. Granddad also raised chickens. During the school year, when the tomatoes were growing nicely, he would bring them in to the school and sell them to the teachers. Nothing like fresh tomatoes during war times? He also sold eggs. Now, granddad had some ducks, too. The duck eggs were a little bit bigger than the chicken eggs and they were also a brown color. So, every once in a while, granddad would put a duck egg in with the chicken eggs that he brought into school. They went over quite well. I’m not sure if anyone knew they were duck eggs.
Granddad was a geologist and it was part of his scientific nature to do things very precisely. He would water the tomatoes every day with a measuring cup. Each plant got a certain amount of water so that the fruit wouldn’t split.
Fast forward to the present century. I have grown herbs off and on over the years, but have now started in earnest, starting up a full blown aquaponics project and I am dedicating it to my Granddad. He passed before I knew him, but I feel I knew him well through my Dad’s stories.
The Aquaponics project started early on in 2011. My wife Debbi and I began researching and brainstorming how we could get things set up. Our first idea was to set up a pond. There were several options. We could get a backyard swimming pool. A 10 foot diameter pool could hold 1000 gallons. However, we settled on getting some plastic ponds that were for sale on Craig’s List. Thus started a HUGE project that not only consisted of putting the two ponds in, but also laying and pouring concrete pathways all around them, setting up a decorative rock garden, etc. etc. It didn’t really support running an aquaponics setup, but we thought we had better get learning about outdoor fish keeping.
In May 2012, we I purchased a 10′ x 20′ carport tent from Costco to house a proper aquaponics setup as shown in the document below. The aquaponics inspiration came from reading a document called ‘Barrel-Ponics’ by Travis Hughey (see the link to this document on the Links page). It’s a well written and photographed account of building a compact, backyard aquaponics system using three 55 gallon plastic barrels. The fish used were Tilapia (a particular type of Cichlid) that are fast growing and tasty.
Now, mind you, I had spent much of a year previous to setting up my tent researching what many others had done, as well as checking into what an amazing fish the Tilapia is. One thing I hadn’t mentioned before is my interest in fish – my wife and I have had fish for many years – all fresh water ones – everything from mollies, danios, botias, swordtails and many other varieties. We also had quite a number of times when our fish would have offspring. The number of fish tanks in our house grew and grew. We had upward of six tanks going at one time. Some time ago, we decided to scale back and settle on one 50 gallon tank. As I began to research aquaponics, we decided to see what Cichlids were like to raise, so we went down to Ocean Floor, our favorite fish source here in Phoenix, to get some. We came back with two pairs, red zebras and white ghosts. At the time, we did not know if we had male/female pairs. As the fish grew, the red zebras became the dominant pair and we lost the white ghosts. However, soon after, we saw that we had a dozen very small zebra fry – guess who had babies? Cichlids are also prolific at producing waste – this is a bane for many aquarists, but is great if you are growing plants. Lots of fish waste means lots of plant food and fertilizer.
I am getting less confident in our globalized food supply. We constantly hear about food that is tainted because of poor growing conditions, and food processed in plants overseas that have very little or no regulatory oversight, even people dying or contracting life-threatening disease because produce came from a field with human excrement. It’s time to make a change people.
I am growing weary of food and vegetables that has little or no taste. I have read many a time of ‘wonderful tasting food’ that can be grown in the back yard. I’m not sure I even know what a real tomato tastes like. It’s hard to tell the difference between a watermelon and a tomato anymore.
Editorial Commentary – I am tired of constantly being ‘marketed to’, or to be told that the next new widget is so much better than the previous widget. I remember the previous generation saying – ‘they don’t make things like they used to…’ It is true today – how many things have you purchased recently are designed to last more that three or four years? Where has our desire for excellence gone? They really don’t make things like they used to, and it’s worse today than it ever was. I would rather take two steps back on new features but go up on quality and durability. Wouldn’t it be a complete shock to everyone if a company were to announce, “here is our new year model widget – guess what? It doesn’t do ANYTHING different than last years model… however, the quality of the parts has improved and our workmanship is reaching new heights.”
So, to make a long story shorter, this part of the Exploring AZ blog will be about our adventure in aquaponics – for several reasons.
- First, so I can keep track of time. I can’t believe it has been over three years since I broke ground for our ponds.
- Second, perhaps you want to do something like what we are doing and can learn a little from my mistakes and perhaps get some ideas, and also contribute too.
Although I find a blog to be a great tool to paste useful information, sometimes the timeline of specific events is not captured correctly. In other words, post 1 may follow post 2, but historically, post 2 happened first. So, to make sense of some of these blog entries, I will provide a timeline.
Project Timeline
The Ponds– October 2011 (in progress)
The Tent– May 27/28 2012
Barrels– April-December 2012 (not yet published)
The Bird Bath – August 2012 (not yet published)
The Trough– January-June 2013
The Box Tank– February-June 2013
The Refrigerator– March 2014
Aquaponics is the best method to make your own food as the product is far superior then the organic food,obviously cuz of lack of pesticides,vegetables tastes great too…fish as well