Time To Get Started

It Begins

Every time I talk about aquaponics I get so excited discussing the potential it has for helping to create a sustainable world. From food production diversity, to delivery fresh food to places which normally would need to ship it in the possibilities seem near endless. The inspiration and excitement is certainly here, now it is time to do some real work!

That first thing I needed to do was research. After some digging online I decided to buy a book, Aquaponic Gardening a Step-by-Step Guide to Raising Vegetables and Fish Together by Sylvia Bernstein. The book was described as a great introduction to aquaponics with a step by step plan to starting your own home system. I highly recommend reading this book cover to cover. The beginning of the book discusses what aquaponics is and some of the upcoming possible issues our current supply chain might face. The book also has plenty of detail to start you own home scaled operation and is a book I recommend anyone interested in the topic read. There is so much material out there to go through it can be daunting, I suggest starting with a good beginner book, then moving to more advance material. Although I have not done it yet, it is recommended to do some research on hydroponics and aquaculture as well.

The second thing I needed to do was get the family’s buy in to build a small scale system at home and where it should be built.. Everyone was on board and more important my wonderful wife was extremely supportive. It was very important to me to have everyone in the house ok with this as it is going to take time and money to get up and running and maintain.

Lastly, it is important for me to stay excited about this. I am fortunate that I have colleagues and friends who are also into aquaponics, so I am able to talk to them about it and dream together about the potential.

Next steps are for me to design, source and build the system and I cannot wait to share my experience with this next step.

Johnny’s Words or Wisdom – Excitement: For those of you who do not follow the other part of my blog, Traveling Through the Ages, I like to end each post with my thoughts, suggestions, or final comments. For today’s it is, Stay Excited. This can be hard to do with everything else going on in life: work, family, COVID, etc. One of the reasons I decided to write about my aquaponics experience was to remain excited about the topic. As previously, mentioned find a good support group and keep moving forward.