Hey guys I'm Mukesh Pawar founder here at “Pawar Zip Farm” upstream aquaponics which is an urban aquaponic farm here in Newmarket. Today we're going to take you on a little tour, and we'll show you how to build your very own system at home? we have about 75 tilapia fish here at upstream aquaponics. They're an integral part of the system. Here we feed them to speed, and that turns into an ammonia rich waste, that comes off these tanks and goes over to our media beds from the fish tank. The ammonia rich water gets pumped into media beds, and in the media beds we have hydrogen clay pellets. These pallets are useful to us, because first of all their pH neutral, and second of all, they provide a lot of surface area for the bacteria to colonize. It turned the ammonia into nitrates and nitrites. From the media beds the nitrites, that gets produced get floated into these grow beds. Here's where the plants take up that really nutritious nitrate and turn it into a food. Matter in doing so they clear out the water for the fish and that symbiosis is the basis of aquaponics. now we're going to teach you how to build your very own system at home. why it'd be cool to build one of these systems at home. Aquaponics is great for growing your own organic produce at home all year round, and you can even grow your own protein, if you grow a fish like tilapia, but you would need a larger tank. The one we have here, so the first thing in your build. You consider are the three main components. You need to build a system. The first one is your aquarium, which is going to house your fish. The water the second piece is the grow bed, which is going to house your medium and the veggies and then lastly are the pumps that are going to circulate. The water and the air within the system we've already filled the tank with water. It needs to sit for 24 hours before you can put fish in it. okay so now let's get to building the first thing to do, is to drill holes for your input and output of water in your grill. Then we've drilled the hole in it. We need to ream it out a little bit usually. We you'd be using a hole saw, but we don't have one which is fine. We'll use a regular drill bit and come in and ream it out a little bit so now. We've got the holes we need. We have this one at the bottom, where we're going to drain and we have one on the other side. Higher up where the water will go into the grow bed.
Now we're going to attach our fittings. We have a washer on one end to make sure, it doesn't leak and we have another fitting on the inside here. I'm going to attach it with This. We put that one in the bottom. We are going to do the same thing at the top. We have piece that uses the hose and the other piece that just holds it on there. We just screw them together. The next step is to add the clay pellets for the plants to grow. Just like in the big system, insert the pallets exact same purpose of converting the ammonia into nitrates for your plants. Now we're going to put the whole system together. The first thing we do is take little basket and cover the drain so the clay pellets, don't clog it. First thing just to make a little space for the filter. Cover it up now we need to attach the hoses. We're going to attach, first of all the drain hose for the bottom, and we add the hose in the top. The intake hose is already attached to our pump. Which we're going to put in the to the tank. We will turn both pump to plug in the air and to the water's ready for the fish. We are going to put the fish in the tank, so now we're ready to turn on the water circulation. We got the pump running. We have got the drain in bin holds quite a bit of water. We're going to add a little bit more water to the system. Then we set the bin on top of the fish tank, and now we're ready to add the plants. We have a couple of options, you can use a commercial plug, you can use a basket that you put your own media into, or the flatpane basket. The hydrogen is it's really easy to work with it's really easy to make a hole, and place plug in, and the other thing you need to think about. When you're planting your plants is just the height level, be conscious of how high the water is going to be? you want to be within about an inch of that height, and we are everything's planted. As a final step we're going to put the whole system on.
It looks better at home, so we built this already and installed our light. We have a light here, if you don't have enough natural light at home. You can still grow your plants. We're going to move the system over to the shelves. What we're going to do right now, and there you have it. Your very own home aquaponic system is ready, in next six weeks you'll have lush green plants. The end of all, you have a beautiful aquarium, and a great garden for you to enjoy year-round in your own home. Be with us at Pawar Zip Farm for more information on hydroponic and other various updates on agriculture systems.
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