Grow Food With 90% Less Water? Aquaponics In Arizona

So to garden in the desert with less water, you garden in water. Hard to believe, isn't it? I have switched this out completely entirely five times now, and it's only been in here for three months. Next week we'll have a fish taco completely from this setup. Doesn't take many fish to feed the kinds of plants that we want to grow. You're going to have a salad almost every day from these guys. It's an actual and visual demonstration of sustainability. If you want to grow food using a lot less water, but you've assumed aquaponics was too expensive or too complicated, watch this. I'm at Arizona Worm Farm, and they're going to show us their aquaponics systems and a simple, inexpensive setup you can build at home. What is this, hydroponics or aquaponics? Real simple difference. In a hydroponic system, the plants still live in water, but you have to give them all of their food. In an aquaponics system, we let the fish feed the plants. It's a perfect circle. The fish poop, that poop gets used to grow plants. The plants clean their water for us, and it goes back in as clean water for the fish. And this uses about a tenth of the water that it takes to grow stuff out in the garden. So surprisingly, growing fish in the desert uses less water to produce both the fish and the vegetables that we grow from that. So to garden in the desert with less water, you garden in water. Hard to believe, isn't it? But that's what we're finding. I have trouble getting good celery here on our farm. It gets a salt accumulation, and it just tastes kind of bitter. Here, we're growing these beautiful celery stalks. Okay, I want to try this. We're growing them with just using the fish. We don't get that bitter taste to it. It's really good. And they grow super fast. We're using tilapia. Tilapia is a pretty easy fish to grow in Arizona. They like warm water. Feeding them with larvae that we're growing here on the farm. You're feeding the fish that you're growing the food with, with the black soldier fly larvae? That we're growing from garbage, from food waste. So instead of burying it in the ground where it produces greenhouse gas, we feed it to black soldier fly larvae. We feed the larvae to the fish. The fish feed the vegetables. There's so many lessons that can be learned from this system and the worm farm overall. Taking waste and turning it into something that can be enjoyed and used. We're now at a point we've had this long enough to where next week we'll have a fish taco completely from this setup. So we'll have the salsa makings, the fish makings, everything but the tortilla ready to go in a three by three container in our backyard. They have to have a circulation pump and it needs to be a little temperature controlled. It can't get too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter. But other than that, it's a relatively simple system. So in how many months of the year, if you're doing this outside in Arizona, does this work? We're thinking nine months. June, July and August are going to be too hot here in the summer. Here in the summer, it's going to be too hot. So it's definitely going to be a winter sort of a thing. For your backyard person, you're going to want to put it, if you don't have a greenhouse, which is nice, you're going to want to put it under full shade. The plants that we grow, the greens will do fine in that kind of a setting. These are cucumbers and you can see they're just starting to sprout. We're experimenting with larger fruiting plants that are doing surprisingly well. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, things like that. We've just had spectacular growth from the greens, lettuces and kales and chard. And now this is a DIY IBC tote, so it's recycled. It's not a brand new one. But if you buy a used one, if you make the cuts yourself, you can do this whole setup for $350, including everything that you need to put in it and your first 25 fish. I want to show you another one that I really am a giant fan of. This is connected to a household aquarium. This cleans the tank for me. It pumps the water up to the top. The water runs through here and comes back clean. I don't have to clean my fish tank and I'm able to grow greens and herbs quite nicely. So this is a really easy aquaponic system that's indoors, which means you can do it year round. Great way to start. Look at all of the different plants. How big can those get? They get really big. In fact, this has been changed just in the last week or so. You got to be eating the lettuce. That lettuce is going to grow and keep you on it. You're going to have a salad almost every day from these guys. We start them in a seed starter. They go in a small container. The container has a mesh that kind of holds the plant itself. The roots extend down into the watering system and then that grows out. So that's cilantro. So it has that around it and then it just this little thing and this comes with that system, I'm guessing. It does. I tasted the celery earlier, but have you noticed a flavor difference? So I think this stuff tastes better. Really? Yeah, I think this stuff tastes better. Tomatoes and peppers, not so much. Lettuces, celeries, chard, the greens. This is where this really shines is with the greens. The water gets cleaner, the water gets purer, and we think they're pretty tasty. It's pretty good. Leslie, I would love to hear more about this setup. About how much does something like this cost? I would say like a ballpark around $150 just to get going, to get started with the basics. So this pump is circulating water from the fish tank with a sub pump that pushes water out of the tank, pulls it into the top of this hydroponic grow tower is what it's called. Then gravity simply pulls the water down through these PVC pipes until it reaches the bottom and then that's going to now come through as a cleaner source of water and it agitates the surface here. So it's adding oxygen into the water as well for the fish. What are some signs when you're looking at this that maybe things aren't quite right just by looking? When I notice that the plants are turning yellow, for instance, faster than they're at their mature size, that tells me that something's off. And again, it's usually a pH, too much ammonia. So maybe I put too much fish in. And a lot of times when you get overly excited and you do things like that too quickly, the plants will show you first more than the fish. Yeah, so this is called the chop and flip model. Basically what we did was took an IBC tote, we chopped the top of it off. I've got a float board in there that is basically just an insulation board. So it's essentially just a board that we cut holes into. And then I put these hydroponic grow cups in them with a media called rockwool. The rockwool acts as a soil, if you will. It's able to hold on to more moisture. So it's got a texture that's similar to maybe like a fabric versus that's more of a rock, right? Look at those roots. And those plants have only been in there for three and a half weeks, under a month. That's incredible. That's crazy, right? And those roots are what keeps the water crystal clear. And all of that sediment on the bottom is all super rich in nutrients. Would you ever harvest that? You can, and I use it in the rose garden. In the rose? I might steal some of this from my roses. Can I pick some of it up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I want to see it. I mean, it's clean, you know, it's just like touching worm castings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so it's kind of mossy a little. Oh, this is fish poop. It's fish poop that has been converted into nitrate bacteria. If there's a really strong fish smell, that really opens my eyes to, okay, what's different? What have I done different? What are the fish doing differently? That usually signals to me it's an indicator that I need to do a water change. So it's a pretty regular maintenance schedule then, of your switching out some of the water and adding that in. Now the tilapia, when you put them in, how big are they? And then how big do they get when you want to harvest? Yeah, so I got them as babies. They were pretty young. They were only about a month or two old, about this size. And within three months, now they are ready to harvest. To feed them the tilapia pellets and then the black soldier fly larvae. The larvae, because it contains, you know, so much protein and calcium for them, they just like grow really rapid. This is called deep water culture. This is called media grow bed. So you're growing in strictly just lava rock, and the water just barely trickles into here enough to keep the lava rock wet, but there's no deep water. What's the best advice you could give them? They're thinking, you know what, this is something that I might want to try. Yeah, so be patient. Patience is key, and finding out that it's a balance is really just understanding that you can't do too much at one time. And when you try and put too much fish in at one time, where you put the plants in too soon before the water has cycled, then you're going to start to see some things that could possibly go wrong. So be patient. Let the water cycle with the fish for, you know, a week, a couple weeks. Then start slowly adding in the plants, because there's not enough nutrients for the plants to survive until the water has been cycled by the fish. Okay. Also choose a location that makes sense that can be a semi-permanent location, because this is a lot of water and it's not, you can't move it when it's full. You would have to drain it if you felt like after installing it that that's not working for me or it gets too much sun. So really know your yard, you know, know and understand that there should be a microclimate, something that can provide shade for it. The more shade, the better, in my opinion. How much time do you think this would take per week? This one's simple, you know, 30 minutes to an hour per week is what you should commit yourself to. So that's about the time commitment that I'm taking on. If I want to do something like this home one, how much time am I talking about? Yeah. So realistically, every morning I test the water. That's a quick technique. And then I feed. So it's 10, 15 minutes every morning. Then I take a look at the plants. If something needs to be harvested, then you're going to spend another 10 to 15 minutes harvesting. You'll be harvesting weekly. So make time for that. It's kind of like your garden. You want to spend some time every day and then plan for a little bit of extra time to do the maintenance that's required to keep it. Can you show us how you test the water? Absolutely. So then you get yourself one of these. These are really easy to use kits. It's just a dipstick. We've got a little more advanced one that's similar to like a soil test that has a drip. But these are quick results. You just take one of these strips, stick it in the water, hold it in there simply just for a few seconds. And then it's got a card on the back that shows you what are the relatable colors. That lets you know kind of what's going on behind the scenes so you know where things are going. Yes. All right. Any other advice you'd give to someone? Or who is this perfect for? This is a backyard gardener. Easy setup. I would say with the deep water culture, there is a little more maintenance than the media substrate bed. So I feel like the media substrate bed, when you use lava rock versus the float method, it's a little more forgiving and you can grow more things in it. So this is floating on water. It's considered deep water culture. And it's the sediments that fall after the plants have used the nutrients from the nitrate. So then that one, the difference is it's growing in lava rock that's hydrated with a small trickle of fish water. So it's not considered deep water culture, less mosquitoes, and you can grow things that have a deeper root zone, like nightshades, for instance. Okay. So your tomatoes. Yep. All right. So is it possible to do that media in something like this? You can. And that's the cool thing about this. So if you get sick of doing the deep water culture, or maybe you just want to experiment with something new, you can take the float board out, drain the water, clean it, put some lava rock in, and now you have a whole new growing system. What's been your favorite part? What do you love about this? Oh, how fast the food grows. There's no weeding. I don't have to bend over. It's the fastest I've ever seen food grow, and I've been doing this a long time. So those lettuces were planted two weeks ago. This- Oh, you're kidding. Two weeks ago. That was three weeks ago. These have been in here for three weeks. There's already fruit producing on them. I have switched this out completely entirely five times now, and it's only been in here for three months. This is the kind of fast food we need, right? Yeah. Fast food. Very fast. And it uses 90% less water than soil. Less water, and it's faster. Is there any reason not to do this? If you don't have time. If you don't have time, and you're not dedicated to this, but every gardener should be dedicated. So if you are already dedicated in soil growing methods, and you feel like you want something a little quicker, maybe even a little bit easier, because you're not weeding, and again, you're not bending over. And for me at this age, if I can walk up to a garden, I love that. You know, I love that. It's very simple in those aspects. Well, Leslie, thank you so much for teaching us all about this. You got it. My pleasure.