Growing Vegetables Without Soil #organic [ Amazing Aquaponics ]
Channel: iThinkSustainable
Date: 16/10/2021

Growing Vegetables Without Soil [ Aquaponics ]



Hi, Hayden from Perth Aquaponics. I'm just down here at the Perth Home Show. I would like to show you an IBC System we've got on display down here. This system is made from a recycled, repurposed IBC. What we've done, we've cut the top off the IBC. We've turned it over and turned that into a grow bed. So down here, the bottom half of the IBC is being used as a fish tank. We've got our silver perch fish down in the bottom there and our pump down there. The pump is picking up that water and the fish waste, pumping it up here to the grow bed. You can see this is pumping in here. This runs 24/7. So this growing bed is flooding and draining by the use of what's called a bell syphon. You can see the water level is up to here at the moment. That's actually slowly filling up that grow bed as the pump is pumping the water in. This is our bell syphon over here. When the water level gets up to the top of the standpipe, which is just a little bit higher than here, this growing bed will actually, oh, there we go, actually, our syphon has actually started draining, good timing. So the grow bed's now draining. This grow bed, you can see it's draining very quickly. That'll drain to about here over a period of about a minute and a 1/2, two minutes. The syphon will cut off and the whole process will start again. So up here in the grow bed, we've got a mixture of vegetables. We've got lettuces, cos lettuce. We've got some basil. The system, the grow bed, contains expanded clay, which is a nice, light, porous material that provides a nice surface area for the beneficial bacteria that are required within the system. This entire system here uses about one-tenth to 20% of the water of a normal soil veggie garden. So it's very environmentally friendly, with very low water usage. It's built using recycled materials. So if you wanna see the system in real life, come on down to the Perth Home Show or drop into our showroom at 171-174 Abernathy Road in Belmont.