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  • From: venaurafarm <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] pc aquaponics
  • Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2012 16:49:55 -0400

On 10/13/2012 1:34 PM, georg parlow wrote:
Thank you folks, for the numerous responses. I learned a dramatic
amount in this discussion. To sum up my personal learning highlights:
*) AP is an ecosystem of it's own right, with even bigger numbers of
invisible life forms than soilbased ag;
*) The high oxigenation is a major key to the high plant growth in APs;
*) The permaculture-ness of AP is not in the method, but how I
integrate it with the rest of my system, e. g. production of fish-food
[plant waste, red wrigglers, mealworms, maggots], the needed energy,
how I insulate [dug-in, lean-on or free-standing greenhouse], how I
market, what other uses I find for my greenhouse, etc.

Thank you all who contributed.

Questions I do have now are:
*) What about foliar feeding the nutrients that might be short in
supply in the water? Some of this was covered in the excellent
compilation about comost teas, etc. - Thx, Lawrence! - but I am
lacking the information how to choose my EM or tea ingredients in
order to target specific lacks.

What would you choose if you needed to balance nutrition in your garden soil, i.e. correct any nutrient/trace nutrient deficiencies or imbalances (a big order; Michael Astera is into mineral balancing through soil testing and accurate amounts of mineral supplements applied to your soil for nutrient/balance correction)?

The challenge would be to create a supplement containing those "missing nutrients" that is compatible with your hydroponics or aquaponics system. Of course, the same would apply to _any_ nutrients used in such systems, that which is added to irrigation water. In an aquaponics system you would need to test for plant available nutrients and trace minerals then add what is missing.

Back to square one and Georg's integrated permacultural whole systems approach: what are you feeding the fish? What fish varieties are you growing? Some are vegetarian, others not.

The big challenge would be to produce nearly all inputs on your permaculture homestead or farm, assuming a diversified operation with animals. Grains can be dried and ground for fish food, extra eggs can be hardboiled and ground up (will fish eat them?), some varieties of duckweed are very high protein; dry it and mix with milled grain, dry in sun, grind it up then feed it. Sawfly maggots and many other insect larvae could be fed to fish. Is there any research on any of this?

Disclaimer: I am just speculating, never having had any experience with aquap/hydrop, but I am intrigued with complex integrated indoor/outdoor
self regenerating food production systems using a minimum of external inputs. Use of site produced compost tea types can be a starting point for amending your hyd/aqua nutrient delivery system, You have a wide range to pick from and that includes fermented plant extracts which can come from weeds and other plant material grown in your carefully maintained biointensive garden which is nutrient and mineral balanced,
i.e. Ultimate Soil maxed out with black gold organic matter. The more you use materials for compost tea and compost and soil improvement that are grown on site the better off you will be. I am assuming you have obtained natural fartilizers from off site to build the quality of your garden soil, things such as azomite, aragonite, hi-cal lime, dehydrated granular seaweed, fresh or extracts from, greensand, colloidal phosphate, rock phosphate, possibly sulphur, borax, sul-po-mag, humates, whatever is required to achieve maximum soil fertility using natural amendments.


Any information on that available?
*) I do not grok the seawater growing thing. a) I believed that most
plants are not salt tolerant. Yet I read that they lushly thrived on
seawater. Is either advocate lying or is there a synthesis to this
that I do not grasp? b) If salt is good for plant health (and I also
know that some salt is good for fish health, for they tolerate more
salt than some of their parasites) - why not simply dump seasalt into
the AP?

IF i had access to sea water I would apply a little of it on my gardens on a regular basis. Bagged, dried, granulated seaweed is better than nothing. Here is another option for those not near the sea: culture various types of algae and a variety of aquatic plants, expecially duckweed. Harvest and use these instead of seaweed or sea water. If you build catchment ponds or pools that fill with runoff from gardens and fields the pond will have nutrient rich water to grow those aquatic plants to add to your gardens or make compost or compost tea with.
If your only water impoundment is a constructed wetland inside your aqua/hydro greenhouse then you can grow an amazing variety of water plants that will not only purify your irrigation water but supply food for fish and materials to make compost tea with that, in turn, is introduced into your aqua/hydro plant production system, If you are not growing fish or shrimp then you can still make great use of an indoor constructed wetland (lagoons, shallows, solar powered pump to send system water over a wade, natural gravel bed that empties into the lagoons.

There are endless possibilities and your questions are top priority important, Georg. Have you been to Sepp Holzer's permaculture site?

Here is one of many more questions to ask: Could you use clean water from a pond on your property in an aqua/hydro system? If so then that
might be a good base on which to build fertility and microbe colonies.

It seems that if you are using compost tea in such a system then creation of it could be started in a brewer, leaving the final aeration stage to the liquid circulation/aeration equipment in the aqua/hydro system, delivering the water/nutrient mix to plants and fish in as fresh and biologically active a state as possible.

Unlimited possibilities.

LL

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Georg Parlow
************
g.parlow@gmx.at
1230 Wien, A-Baumgartnerstr. 4/B1/013
+43-650-8899345





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