Fish Tank Hydroponics

[mwampoki]

Not sure if this would be the right place to post, but since my question involves a FW fish tank and plants I thought I would give it a go. I have been growing two strawberry plants hydroponically for a couple of months off of my 45 gallon tank. I was wondering if other people had experimented with growing plants off of their tanks, what they grew, and what the results were/are?

I took a 24" length of 3" PVC, capped one end, and on the other I put a threaded cap on so it is removable. Stuck a 1/8" hose barb on one end for the input from a Tom's Aqualifter pump. On the end witht the threaded cleanout, I drill a hole big enough to put in a 5/8" OD drain line as a return line to the tank. Put my strawberry plants in there, and filled the whole thing with gravel as a medium. Seems to be working well so far. All the leaves on the plants died back and I thought I had killed them for the first 3 weeks after I put them in then they started to grow like mad.

 

[Rivercats]

Thats quite interesting. Never did anything quite that elaborate. For me I've just used plants like Potho's growing over the side of my tank with roots in the water and using some bog type plants in HOB filters as nutrient sponges.

 

[jetajockey]

I have been digging into this idea quite a bit, and I plan to do a very large setup in the next few months. I do have a small setup going right now, it's very basic though. I just set it up so it's not pretty, but it's functional. Also, it's called aquaponics if there are fish involved.

http://youtu.be/wAVPG_hCT6w

 

[mwampoki]

Awesome setup! I have been thinking of doing something similar since the strawberries seem to be growing and I haven't noticed any ill affects on the fish in the tank.

What are you using for lighting? I have always had veggies that I grow indoors under artificial lighting get really long and stringy. Seems like everything you are growing is happy with your setup.

I would definitely be interested in getting updates on your experiment to see how things progress!

 

[jetajockey]

Awesome setup! I have been thinking of doing something similar since the strawberries seem to be growing and I haven't noticed any ill affects on the fish in the tank.

What are you using for lighting? I have always had veggies that I grow indoors under artificial lighting get really long and stringy. Seems like everything you are growing is happy with your setup.

I would definitely be interested in getting updates on your experiment to see how things progress!

I'm planning to do some large outdoor ones in the next few months.

In that setup right now there's just a single t5ho over the entire shelf, I have some 85w cfl's on their way right now though so I'm going to replace it with those, or I may run all of them lol. We'll see.

Having intense lighting is the key to keep the plants compact, they grow leggy because they are trying to get closer to the light.