Gone Fishin'

After several months of putting it off and then waiting for our cabbages to be ready for harvest, last week we harvested some of our tilapia. What has cabbage got to do with when to harvest tilapia? Fish tacos! We wanted to have our own cabbage to go along with our own fish in those tacos. It was worth the wait! And we harvested enough fish to do it again in the near future.
 

The seven fish we took were from 12 to 15 inches long. We didn't weigh them--our apologies to the anglers out there. Suffice it to say, though, that these were all record setters and breakers. In this bunch were the longest, heaviest, shortest, lightest, ugliest, prettiest, and tastiest fish we've ever taken out of our fish farm, because one of them was also the first fish to be harvested from our fish farm.

We're finding that raising fish in a "barrel" doesn't require as much effort as we imagined.

We use an aquaponic system to raise our fish--that's a combination of aquaculture and hydroponics, making a symbiotic (mutually beneficial) environment. In other words, the fish wastes supply nutrients to plants, and plants by using the waste, clean up the water that the fish live in.

The fish water is pumped to the plant beds filled with gravel (or other growing media) where it feeds our plants (greens, cucumbers, tomatoes, herbs, etc.) and then filters through the gravel and drains back into fish tank.

Thanks to politicians and bureaucrats, water in California is in short supply. This system saves water--so far, due to transpiration and evaporation, we have had to add only 20 to 25 gallons of water per week to our 500 gallon system. That is much less than we would have to use in a soil garden to keep the same number of plants watered.

The only other regular input to the system is fish food, and some of that we grow ourselves--actually the fish grow it. We occasionally add chelated iron and liquid seaweed fertilizer.

Right now in our tanks, we have about 80 fish, ranging in size from two to ten inches. Depending on the weather, we should be able to harvest about sixty of these in the next eight months. In other words, we’ll have fish dinners about twice a month over that time. There are also two four-by-four foot growing beds for the plants. From these beds we have harvested celery, peppers, herbs, strawberries (there are a couple of nice-sized berries that will be ripe in a week or so), chard, scallions, tomatoes, and kale to name some of our favorites.

Once again, we have to say, that if we can do this, so can you. We re-purposed three 275-gallon IBC totes to make our tanks. The whole system of three tanks runs on one pump, so set up cost was pretty low, about 700 dollars, which includes the fish. Our input is fairly low also: a little water, some fish food, some fertilizer now and then (more at the beginning, than on-going). As a result, we have a perpetual supply of fish and lots of fresh veggies, to boot, in an area on our patio that measures four by twelve feet. It is container gardening on steroids.

Our favorite book on the subject (one we wish we could have used when we got started) is Sylvia Bernstein’s Aquaponic Gardening: A Step-By-Step Guide to Raising Vegetables and Fish Together, which you can find, along with lots of information and even classes, on her website: Aquaponic Source.

You can also read reviews and purchase the book on Amazon