How is your aquaponics fruit production going? Let’s boost it 🙂
When you start an aquaponics setup, you must leave time for the bacteria to colonize the media. This is what we call “Cycling” the setup. The biodiversity is increasing and a complex ecosystem develops day after day. The variety of life is perpetually evolving with time and seasons. But there is a “climax” generally reached after a full year of development. At this point, the system offers a wide range of minerals and nutrients into the water. Those are available for the plants growth.
Easy growers first
I generally recommend to plant young aquaponics setups with leafy vegetables. Such as lettuce, spinach, silver-beat, celery…
We can classify those vegetables as “easy growers”. Indeed, they mainly grow leaves and leaves are generally less demanding than fruits.
What does a fruit need to grow in aquaponics…
Aquaponics fruits (tomatoes)
Fruit plants (tomatoes, chili, egg plants…) need a complex blend of nutrients. Those nutrients are only available in “mature aquaponics systems”. In aquaponics, each living creature specializes to transform a specific element into another. Hence, mature ecosystems offer a great blend of nutrients for fruit production.
Evolution of aquaponics biodiversity
To produce a fruit, the plant need to first produce a flower. Insects or wind pollinate the flower and transform it into a nice and succulent fruit.
This activity requires a large quantity of potassium. It is indeed well known that potassium increases plants flowering and fructification. Hence, a mature aquaponics setup with limited fruit production may be in potassium limitation. You can increase the quantity of potassium in your system by adding some potash into your water.
Less is more!
Keep in mind that a significant quantity of potassium will boost the flowering of all your plants. Yes, this include the leafy plants…
I generally recommend to keep a large diversity of plants together in your grow-beds. Therefore, you will probably have leafy plants and fruit plants in the same setup. If you add some potassium in your water it will act on the leafy plants and will push them to produce seeds. When a lettuce produce seeds, it grows in height and decrease the leaves production. Furthermore the taste generally becomes bitter.
A question of compromise…
The general idea of Aquaponics (as opposed to hydroponics) is that we are not working in mono-culture. We work with a large and harmonious poly-culture. Therefore, the environment should not be only adapted to a specific plant. But it should offer the best compromise for all plants of the system. Hence, Be thoughtful when you add your potassium. Only add small quantities at the time. it will avoid having all your leafy vegetables growing in height and becoming bitter.
You will probably be interested to discover Jonathan’s six steps to build and manage an Aquaponics system. Click here to access for free! Thanks and good reading 🙂
