permaculture

[Daniel Jager <dfjager@yahoo.com>]

Plant evolution created root systems for land plants to penetrate the soil. 
To grow in soil that is not nutritionally balanced, and can *never be* 
totally balanced in Nature. And to adapt plant species to specific soils and 
climate conditions.

* What would happen to the root strength if one were to grow aquaponics 
vegetables over a few plant generations?

* What would happen to the strength of a vegetable/fruit strain, if you 
provide all nutrients in easily accessible form? By analogy: what happens to 
humans when they have to do no effort, and get everything they need whenever 
they want...???

* What happens when human 'ingenuity' stops, and Nature takes charge again? 
Would we have natural aquaponics ecosystems, or just murky wetlands, nutrient 
poor bogs, estuaries, tidal flats, and the like. With the natural plant and 
animals species adapted to the specific constraints of that ecosystem: both 
climatologically, soil physiologically and nutritionally.

Daniel



> Subject: Re: [permaculture] pc aquaponics
> To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Message-ID: <C6524D99-51CC-4C5B-95C7-03B24AEE2FD3@patternliteracy.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> Thanks, Christopher. I, like most people, have a strong
> preference for working in the dirt instead of using a bunch
> of tanks and pipes to grow food, but, then, soil ag, too, is
> pretty mechanized these days.
> 
> To sum up: there is nothing special about soil, in one
> sense: it is a medium for the propagation of the microbes
> that convert manure and other non-available nutrients into
> plant-available nutrients, and it can hold water and
> air.  Same with water. Instead of a rock-based medium
> to hold microbes and nutrients, aquaponics uses water as the
> medium, which is a nice stacking of functions, if you think
> about it, because soil has to be kept wet for microbes and
> plants to grow, while water doesn't, and most of the
> nutrients that plants use are water soluble, converted into
> that form from insoluble form by microbes. The carbon, the
> energy source for the microbes, is provided by the OM in the
> fish manure instead of OM from insect frass and animal
> manure. 
> 
> And aquaponics has a couple of advantages over soil systems,
> because a water medium can transport nutrients to microbes
> and plants much more quickly than soil. In soil, water moves
> by diffusion, and once the water, or the nutrients in it,
> are used up in one area, the organisms must wait for more to
> diffuse in before they can feed or get moisture, and that
> can take time--and sometimes it doesn't happen, and the
> plants or bugs die. Same with oxygen, which can't travel
> well in compacted soil. 
> 
> But in a water medium, nutrients are constantly being
> circulated to where they are needed, as is air. That's one
> reason that growth rates in aquaponics is much faster than
> in soil.
> 
> To make it clear: Aquaponics is not hydroponics plus fish.
> Hydroponics uses water-soluble nutrients from the get-go,
> with no microbes in the mix. Aquaponics, just like soil ag,
> relies on microbes to convert manure into plant-available
> form. Big difference--the former is chemistry, the latter is
> an ecosystem.
> 
> Toby
> http://patternliteracy.com
> 
>