Fish Garden

[politicalcenter]

Yup! Hybrid Bluegill. All I've read and been told is that they are hardy enough to survive our 850 gallon tank that is sunk in the ground out back. I've talked to the folks that sell them and they've stated that the fish will be .5lb in a couple months with good feeding and ready for harvest once they hit 1lb. We're recirculating the water from the tank into two aquaponics grow beds. No weeds for us to pull either. Yay!!!

850 gallons is fine for gills as long as you keep the oxygen up and the ammonia down. If you breed hybrids they will revert back to green sunfish and native bluegill.

But 850 gallons is too small to breed bluegill anyway. I have native bluegill now and I am thinking about some coppernose. They are supposed to grow faster and reach two pounds.

 

[politicalcenter]

I would really like to try this for myself. I like the couple of systems that people posted on this forum and am trying to figure out how to incorporate one into my greenhouse.
How deep of a container do you need for hybrid bluegill?
Is it better to have the fish high and gravity drain into the veg beds, then pumped back up into the fish tank, or have the veg beds high and pump the dirty water up into the planting beds and have them gravity drain back into the fish tank.
I have seen them both ways, but I am leaning toward the second option, tank low beds high. That way I know that if I develop a leak in the pumping system I won't drain my tank and overflow the beds. I also have the option to manually pump the water up into the beds if the pump goes out.

So many of the homes around here have backyard ponds and we want to build one for ourselves. I want one big enough for fish! ha,ha The NRCS tells me that I am going to need about 1 acre of open water to keep a sustainable fish population. I am thinking that if I add an aerator that it won't have to be quite that big. I need to get a map and see how big our pond area actually is.

If I lived in an area with cold winters I would put my tanks low and my plants high simply because cold air will fall and frost won't kill the fish. I would also insulate the bottoms of the water tanks to keep the ground from "sucking out" the heat from your tanks....but...I don't do aquaponics with plants....just fish.

I like my veggies grown in dirt.

 

[Rocky64]

Ah, yeah, I've never done fish on that scale. We had koi that bred in a backyard pond, but we didn't really do anything to promote that. It just kinda happened, LOL!

I had the same thing happen to me, just with goldfish, not koi.