Turn Your Vegetable Garden Planning Upside Down

Turn Your Vegetable Garden Planning Upside Down

Article by M Wilson

For gardeners in the northern hemisphere, it is time to start your vegetable garden planning. As many gardeners are getting ready to start working the soil, an increasing number are trading their shovels, rakes and tillers in for a much easier, more effective and more fun way to grow a vegetable garden.

Even though people have been working the soil for thousands of years, it really is a difficult way to grow crops. In most cases, growing vegetables in the ground is literally working against nature. You will be putting out a lot of effort digging and working the soil, pulling weeds, fighting with gophers, slugs, snails and other pests, and wasting large amounts of water and fertilizer. And then have to do it all over again year after year.

These are some of the reasons that many long time gardeners are switching to aquaponics. Aquaponics is a system that is quickly becoming popular. With aquaponics, you create an organic and natural system that works with nature instead of against it. Instead of using chemical fertilizers for your plants, fish will take care of your plants for you. Yes, I said fish.

Fish are very easy to grow, they are one of the most common pets in American homes. Their wastes are also full of organic plant nutrients. The biggest problem with raising fish is keeping their water clean. Plant roots are great at cleaning the water by filtering these materials out. This makes fish and plants a perfect match.

Aquaponics is a system where you put nature to work for you to grow many times more food in a smaller space. Where instead of creating chores for yourself that you have to do over and over, you can do a little work at first and the system will produce food for you perpetually for many years with only a little maintenance.

The traditional vegetable garden plan is to plant seeds or seedlings, and then dump fertilizer and huge amounts of water on the ground all season long, so that plants will be able to absorb a small percentage of it. The rest is wasted through evaporation and soaking deep into the ground. With aquaponics, you grow plants in grow beds without soil. Water from the fish tank gets pumped into the grow bed, giving the plants all the water and nutrients they need. After the water passes through the grow bed, it is returned to the fish tank.

A system like this is will usually cost less and will be less work than trying to condition the ground to grow your garden. And that includes caring for both the plants and the fish. This type of system is more fun, and has the bonus of providing fresh organic fish. You can grow fish like tilapia, bass, catfish, barramundi and many other fish that are great to eat. And if you don’t want to eat them, there are many ornamental fish that can be fun to grow.

This is a way to grow vegetables that are truly organic. By giving plants exactly what they want, vegetable production can be spectacular. And the vegetables produced with this kind of system are known to have that garden grown taste and quality, unlike a lot of hydroponic systems.

You can start small with this type of system and see for yourself how well it works. You can use it as an addition to your vegetable garden planning and easily scale up as you go.

This aquaponics guide will show you step by step how to set up a low cost simple system that will amaze you with the amount of food it will produce in such a small space.

About the Author

Download your aquaponics guide.

http://TilapiaFarming.org

Vegetable Garden Planning