Aquaponic Gardening: A Step-By-Step Guide to Raising Vegetables and Fish Together

Dive into home aquaponics with this definitive do-it-yourself guide

Aquaponic Gardening gives you all the tools you need to create your own aquaponic system and enjoy healthy, safe, fresh and delicious food all year round.

Aquaponics is a revolutionary system for growing plants by fertilizing them with the waste water from fish in a sustainable closed system. A combination of the best of aquaculture and hydroponics, aquaponic gardening is an amazingly productive way to grow organic vegetables, greens, herbs and fruits, while providing the added benefits of fresh fish as a safe, healthy source of protein. On a larger scale, it is a key solution to mitigating food insecurity, climate change, groundwater pollution and the impacts of overfishing on our oceans.

Starting with an overview of the theory, benefits and potential of aquaponics, Aquaponic Gardening explains:

• System location considerations and hardware components
• The living elements -- fish, plants, bacteria, and worms
• Putting it all together -- starting and maintaining a healthy system.

Aquaponics systems are completely organic. They are four to six times more productive and use 90 percent less water than conventional gardens. Other advantages include no weeds, fewer pests, and no watering, fertilizing, bending, digging, or heavy lifting - in fact, there really is no down side Anyone interested in taking the next step towards self-sufficiency will be fascinated by this practical, accessible and well-illustrated guide.

Sylvia Bernstein is the president and founder of The Aquaponic Source and the co-Founder and former Vice Chairman of the Aquaponics Association. She also manages AquaponicsCommunity.com, the largest US-based online forum site dedicated to aquaponic gardening. An experienced speaker and internationally recognized expert on aquaponic gardening, Sylvia writes and blogs on the subject for the Aquaponic Gardening Blog, Maxiumum Yield and more. Her inspiration is a large, thriving aquaponic setup in her backyard greenhouse in Boulder, CO powered by tilapia, catfish, bluegill and other creatures-that-swim.