Aquaponics at Mulberry Farm

Aquaponics at its cheapest

I'm thinking that I first read about aquaponics, a combination of hydroponics and aquaculture about 4 years ago. I was instantly intrigued with the notion of growing plans and fish in the same system. I had known about hydroponics for quiet a long time and was toying with the idea of trying it out. At the time I had watched for over a week as it rained and rained and flooded my garden to the point of killing some of the plants. So I was on the web reading about hydroponics when I came across this site that used a re-purposed IBC tote to grow fish and plants. I just had to try and do this.
Within 2 weeks I had my tote and was happily cutting away at it.
Using the top section that was cut off for the grow bed.
However finding a medium for planting in that was cheap wasn't easy. The stuff most folks were using Hydro-ton, little clay balls was very expensive and not readily available in my area. Some people were using small gravel but this seemed too heavy for the simple structure that makes up the grow-bed. Then I found out about expanded clay that is used for light weight concrete. There is a cement plant about 15 miles from here and they were happy for me to have all of the light weight aggregate that I could load as it was a left over from a job from years ago. This stuff was full of poison ivy and weeds from being left in one spot for so long. I managed to get enough of it cleaned up that day to get 12 five gallon buckets. This turned out to be enough to fill my first grow-bed. Now a trip to the discount store for a pump. Did I mention that this whole thing needed to be cheap to build?  Two years later I'm on the second pump. The first one was too cheap and only lasted about 8 months. The new pump is from a big box lumber store and has a two year warranty. The pumps for these systems are small needing a flow equal to the total volume of the tank to be pumped in one hour. A year an a half later and this one is still going strong. I think that I'll try a solar powered one after this one. This one uses only about $0.70 cents of electricity per month so the solar one will have to be cheap to buy and last a long time as well. The pump runs full time filling the grow-bed with fish waste water. As it reaches a preset level the water overflows into a siphon pipe that drains the grow bed back into the fish tank even as the pump continues to fill it. The whole process takes about  minutes to do a cycle. So the grow bed fills and drains 3 times per hour.
As there are lots of sites on the internet that tell how and why these systems work I won't go into a lot of detail here.
What I can say is that of the plants that I've tried cabbage,bunching green onions, and mustard greens. They have all flourished. This year I'm trying tomatoes and bell peppers as well and so far it seems like they are wide open an growing. I will follow up as the season progresses. I am hoping that the tomatoes will drape over the sides and stop some of the sunlight entering the tank.

4 Catfish and 4 berm those marshmallow looking things are pieces of floating fish food. We are thinking about adding a dozen or so of goldfish to help boost plant nutrients 

Green bunching onions are over 2 years old.
I just keep pulling them up breaking them apart
and putting them back in. I need to add a wooden
rail of some sort to cover those pieces of steel frame
from poking me when I work around this thing!