Fortunately bacteria is not limited to just soil gardening alone and the same arrangement of bacteria convert ammonia to nitrites in water – everywhere and not exclusively to Aquaponics.

Nitrites exist in water! Drinking water can be harmful to your health! Should we stop drinking water?! Thankfully another form of bacteria converts the nitrites to nitrates that are finally absorbed by plants in Aquaponics. Thats how the process works.

You cannot run an anaerobic aquaponics system ever and expect to grow plants successfully – you may in fact get very sick and die. Thats why people that run real aquaponics systems pump oxygen that not only aerate fish water but through flood and drain mechanisms aerate plant roots and oxygenate the living bacteria that mineralise the plant root system.

Its the bacteria that do the heavy work – in the soil AND in the water. Nature doesn’t discriminate between soil gardening and aquaponics.

An interesting point people should be aware of is that Aquaponics people don’t grow food in sewers as demonstrated in that YouTube clip shown above. I would not recommend adopting that system at all. Let alone expect to feed a family of four…!

Do not confuse hydroponics with aquaponics. Aquaponics systems mimic natural processes. Hydroponics systems requires continual purchase of expensive nutrients and sterile conditions to minimize plant disease as you have correctly pointed out in the above article.

Where we live we have both a soil garden and an aquaponics system. Read my post on which method works best for us – given the narrow urban environment that we live in:
http://www.ecofilms.com.au/2010/08/09/how-does-aquaponics-compare-with-soil-gardening/

Aquaponics really works! It will grow all sorts of plants easily on fish poop. Now, how nutritionally dense that food is – thats a totally different question and open to argument and worthy of further discussion.

How do you measure nutritionally dense food anyway? Has such a gauge ever been made? (I don’t include a Brix refractometer as a suitable measurement at all) But we have eaten tasteless tomatoes grown in Aquaponics systems and Soil Garden systems and I have also eaten beautiful rich authentic flavorsome tomatoes grown in both! Without a suitable nutrition meter – I prefer to let my taste buds tell me whats good or bad…

And his phrasing about “feeding his family of four” is misleading. MAYBE he meets his egg needs, and maybe he eats all the tilapia he wants to (if he doesn’t want to eat much), and he surely gets some veggies, but his family is not fed solely by that greenhouse, as some might interpret.

The chicken appear to have very little vegetation to eat and whats there won’t live long. How do chicken feet react to a lifetime walking on chicken wire I wonder?

My guess is that one could get a lot more bang for the buck by filling the whole pool with water and raising more fish. The older post about the other garden pool is much more impressive.