Beginner's Guide to Aquaponics by Seth Connell

Beginner's Guide to Aquaponics by Seth Connell ISBN-13: 978-1647397487 Paperback: 154 pages Publisher: Rockridge Press Released: September 15th 2020

Source: Review copy from the publisher through Amazon Vine.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
A complete guide for aquaponics beginners. Discover a sustainable way to grow your food—while using a fraction of the water, land, and labor conventional gardens require. The Beginner’s Guide to Aquaponics makes starting your first system simple with easy-to-follow instructions that teach you the basics and offer clear step-by-step instructions.

Combine the benefits of fish farming with hydroponics to grow food in new and efficient ways. Whether it’s understanding how to balance water chemistry, pick your optimal fish and plants, or assemble aquaponic setups, you’ll find tables, blueprints, and practical tips to walk you through each part of the process.

This guide breaks down the most essential aquaponics information with checklists, system design plans, fish/plant charts, and more. Use price estimates and approximate timelines to help you stay on budget and effectively plan out the proper build for your needs. Get expert advice for dealing with any trouble spots you might encounter while building or maintaining your systems.


My Review:
Beginner's Guide to Aquaponics instructs on how to combine fish farming with hydroponics to grow food. The do-it-yourself instructions for the various systems are all for 100 square-foot units. Depending on the system, this could take up something like 5' x 20' or 10' x 10' of floor space, so they take up a lot of room. They generally cost between $3,000 and $6,000 for materials to make your own or about $10,000 if you buy a turnkey system. You will only be able to grow about 10 fish (trout, cod, bass, perch, catfish, etc.) at a time and it will take about 12 months or more for those fish to grow to 1 pound size. You also have to decide if you're going to do cold or warm water fish as this limits what type of plants you can grow. If you're interested in a system like this, then this book contains a lot of useful information.

The book covers everything I think you'd need to know and takes you step-by-step through the process of putting the systems together in general as well as specific step-by-step instructions for building your own systems. Part of my problem with the book, though, is that each aspect was initially covered separately, making it more difficult to see how it all worked together. You look at a chart showing which fish are warm water and which are cold water, then later there's a chart showing which plants can be grown in warm or cold water. It would've been helpful to have these charts on the same page rather than having to search back and flip between them. We're told how tricky it is to keep all the aspects in balance (fish, bacteria, plants) before I even had a clear idea of what the finished systems would look like. So I felt very discouraged even before finding out how expensive and big these systems would be. I'll just stick to small-scale hydroponics, but I do think this book would be helpful for someone already strongly interested in doing this size of aquaponic system.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.