Aquaponics Systems
With a Suburban Farmer aquaponics system you can easily grow edible fish species that can be harvested to supply your family with fresh fish, produced from your own backyard.
What Is Aquaponics?
Aquaponics combines ‘Aquaculure’ and ‘Hydroponics’ to grow edible fish and vegetables harvested from your own backyard.
So not only are you growing fresh edible fish, the filter used to clean the water grows fresh vegetables!
How Does It Work?
The water in a fish tank is high in nutrients and requires filtering. Instead of using a traditional filter, you pump the water into a specially built vegetable garden that feeds and waters your plants. In turn, the vegetable plants obtain the nutrients they need from the water, and return the filtered clean water to the fish tank.
Growing in this nutrient rich water your vegetables experience accelerated growth rates, are stronger and healthier and use about 10% of the water it takes to grow vegetable plants in soil.
With a tested simple design, our systems are simple to maintain, inexpensive to run and can fit in any sized backyard.
Fresh fish and a vegetable garden that you don’t need to water!
Along with maintaining high levels of productivity, Suburban Farmer fish farm systems offer attractive designs that become the feature of your garden.
What We Do
We install quality aquaponics systems of various sizes capable of growing species such as barramundi, marron, trout, yabbies, black bream and silver perch. We can also retro- fit your existing water feature or pond by adding a water-wise vegetable garden filter (growbed).
With a tested simple design, our systems are easy to maintain, inexpensive to run and can fit in the corner of the patio or backyard. You only need 3 square metres in order to grow 25 fish and 30 – 50 vegetable plants.
Fish
- Grow a range of species from Barramundi, Trout, Silver Perch, Marron, Yabbies and more
- Grow 25 fish per vegetable garden filter, and you can increase the amount of fish in your tank by adding more vegetable filters (which means more vegetables too!)
- Easy to look after and cheap to feed
- Grow fish according to the seasons: Barramundi in summer, Trout in the winter
Vegetables
- Grow better vegetables faster! Our fish farms use 10% of the water it takes to grow vegetable plants in the ground
- Grow more vegetables! The plants only compete for light so you can plant more vegetables in a smaller area
- Grow any vegetable!
- Can also grow fruits and herbs
There are a number of factors that influence how many fish you can keep in your tank. Tank size, filter capacity, water quality, fish species and feeding rates are factors that contribute to the amount of fish you can keep in your tank.
We aim to grow 25 fish per vegetable garden filter, and you can increase the amount of fish in your tank by adding more vegetable filters (which means more vegetables too!).
To get started there isn’t a lot you need to know about growing edible fish, in fact there isn’t a great difference between growing goldfish and growing edible fish, the principles are the same. Our systems come with all the tools needed to successfully rear fish to eating size without any prior knowledge of fish farming.
Your fish tank holds fish that are living in a confined environment and at much higher density than they are in nature. This increases the concentration of fish waste which has the potential to foul your water and affect the health of the fish.
In order to filter the water of these substances you need a system that removes excesses of waste and maintains optimum water quality for fish health. A growbed is a specially designed filter system, that uses naturally occurring friendly bacteria to convert fish wastes into a form of nutrient.
Vegetable plants are planted into the filter and the plants extract this nutrient from the water. No other filtration method is required in addition to the growbed.
You don’t need alot of area for a small system, only 2 square meters is enough room. Larger tanks are generally deeper rather than wider so even for a 3000litre tank you would only need a 3 – 4 square meter area.
Our feed is a high quality commercial aquaculture grade feed with optimised nutrition that provides a well balanced diet for the optimum health and growth performance of both your fish and plants.
You can go away for a week without organising someone to feed your fish – no problems at all. Even 2 weeks should be ok, however any longer than this you should organise someone to drop in and feed them.
Yes, and unless you have a rain water tank, you don’t have much choice. The tap water in Perth is pretty good and you really only need to ‘age’ tap water for about 24-72 hours to neutralise the chlorine in the water.
To age the water, you only need to fill your tank and give it 24-72 hours before introducing fish (depending on the amount of water and pump capacity). If you need to top up your water level at any stage, water straight from the tap is fine.
Frequent testing of your water is not necessary and you need only test the water if you notice a sudden change in activity i.e. Your fish have haven’t eaten for a couple of days when they were very good feeders, appear sluggish after previously being very active or start swimming and gulping at the surface of the water. Again, observation is the key and if your water looks dirty and starts to smell this would indicate that water conditions are not ideal.
Again, observation is the key and if your water looks dirty and starts to smell this would indicate that water conditions are not ideal.
Air pumps with automatic battery switchover are available with all fish farms. Also its worth noting that the pump in the fish farm only runs for a quarter of the day and as it is a low voltage pump, it’s very cheap to run.
The fish farms are self maintaining and very little needs to be done to keep them working at an optimum level. In fact as there are natural balances that keep the farms maintained the less you do the better!
The most you need to do is feed the fish, plant your vegetables and check once a month to make sure the drain outlet hasn’t been blocked by stray vegetable roots….very simple indeed!.
No, in fact the fish farm should be out in the open as the vegetables in the filter require full sun.
If you are growing fish for hobby purposes then no license is required.
Gallery
Photos of Suburban Farmer Aquaponics Systems
