Are you looking for ways to go green these day? It’s certainly all the rage, especially when it comes to organic food. But if we look more closely at how we grow our food, we can find a way to take our ecological efforts to a whole new level.
An excellent way to conserve our resources and space is with aquaponics. Have you heard of it yet? Most folks haven’t. It’s still very new, at least to the public, and yet aquaponics has actually been around for ages. You might say it’s just about as old as dirt.
Aquaponics is basically just the combination of hydroponics (growing plants in water) and aquaculture (growing fish in a tank). The plants and the fish work together to keep the system in balance. The fish provide fertilizer for the plants, while the plants filter the water for the fish. It’s an eloquent picture of the balance of nature.
But besides this natural balance of nature, just what can aquaponics do for us? Why should we grow our food this way?
First, we can conserve water with aquaponics. The water within an aquaponics system circulates from fish to plants and back to the fish again. Very little, if any, of the water is wasted. It’s a great way to conserve one of our most precious natural resources.
Secondly, we can conserve space with aquaponics. In an aquaponics system more plants and produce will grow in less space than with traditional gardening techniques. Some proponents suggest we can grow up to 10 times the amount of produce that a traditional garden would yield for the same space. That means we could produce more food per acre. Just think what we could do to solve the hunger problem throughout the world if more farmers used aquaponics instead of traditional methods
And last of all, the plants thrive on aquaponics. The waste given off from the fish provides the plants with virtually everything they need. Plus the water supplies those nutrients directly to the roots of the plants. The combined effect is that the plants grow much faster than with traditional gardening techniques, in some cases up to twice as fast.
Basically, aquaponics will do more for you than just make you ecologically responsible. It will put your garden on organic overdrive. And you will have fish to eat with your abundant harvest. You might want to start looking around your area for various aquaponics systems, or better yet, start your own. It’s the wave of the future.
Tags: aquaponic, aquaponic systems, aquaponics, ecology, Gardening, Gardening Articles, Gardening Articles, green living, homesteading, hydroponic growing, hydroponic systems, hydroponics, organic garden, organic gardening
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