Home aquaponics kit - possible use for orchids?
 

So I funded this kickstarter project a while back Home Aquaponics Kit: Self-Cleaning Fish Tank That Grows Food by Nikhil & Alejandro — Kickstarter and apparently they're ready to start sending them out to us. My original intention with this was for growing herbs like what they have in the demo, but I'm wondering if it would work for orchids? It seems like it's just a shared S/H setup. The only downside I see is that since they're sharing the water they would be sharing diseases but other than that what do you guys think?

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I've wanted to try aquaponics with orchids for many years now. I think an ebb and flow system would work best with many types of orchids. This particular system would probably work the best if you had a pot with hydroton media wicking water up to the orchid(s) potted above. Of course, orchids don't grow as fast as most plants and therefore don't take up as many nutrients, which is key to keeping this system healthy. I would only have a few orchids present so that the non orchid plants can do their work to clean the water and thus keep the system working.

It may not be the best idea for orchids, but good for you for investing in innovations made by young growers!

Even if it's not I thought it was a cool idea and this one was not that expensive to fund so I thought, might as well :)

I've often wondered about this topic myself. I was thinking aeroponics might be the best one to try. If you do try it, please let us know the results.

I think this could work for orchids... however one of the reasons for Ray developing the idea of S/H was because in the sort of setup in the link about orchids share the water reservoir and that can lead to the spread of diseases between the plants. Just something to bear in mind if trying something like this.

The concept is awesome-- just keep in mind that you have much less control over the specific nutrition that the plants are getting. The nutrients mainly come from fish waste, plus whatever supplements you put in the water, but it's hard to measure just how much of what will make it through to the plants. Either way, you'd need to keep an eye on the buildup of minerals & salts.

If you really wanted to, you could set up individual pots with individual reservoirs and water each with different tubes to keep their germs segregated.

I don't think I'm going to try it, I love my orchids too much to put them at risk for some shared disease, and like you guys said, I would have no control over nutrients. And I wouldn't want to put fertilizer in the water because who knows what would happen to the fish. I posted it more out of curiosity as to what you guys thought and I wanted to share something I thought was cool with you guys :)

I have to say, I still think its a great idea. You don't need to control the nutrients of the plants and you don't need to add fertilizer to the tank because the fish does that with their waste products. Certain veggies can grow 10x faster in aquaponics than with traditional dirt farming and if you grow only one orchid that you're not too concerned about, no big deal if you lose it. But if it grows significantly faster than normal....

I do it all the time! :D

You can look up planted aquariums, it's pretty cool. My fish tank is full of nice lush plants. I even add co2 to increase growth. So long as you measure things correctly, the fish don't mind a bit. They need certain minerals and so on as well.

I actually have an aquatic version of a compost pile, too-- it has worms and snails and critters that like to eat plant trimmings, and I supplement my main tank with water (and live food for the fish) from the compost tank. It's like running a whole ecosystem basically.

I got several noid orchids from trader joes and I'll be watering a couple of them from my aquarium to see how they do with it.

To an extent, yes-- but a lot depends on what specifically you're feeding the fish, how many of them there are, etc. Not all plants have the same nutritional needs, so adjustments might need to be made. You also need to keep an eye on the pH and sometimes may even need to add chemicals for the fish, like calcium or magnesium (very important for their health!). It is a good idea to monitor phosphate and nitrate levels. Some things can't be measured very well, like potassium and specific trace minerals, so there's a bit of guesswork in there too.

I have so many plants in my tank that they eat up all the nitrate from the fish waste, and I have to add more to keep them happy.

I'm very curious how orchids will do with that water. It'll take time to test, but I'll be posting about it.

Cool, well there's space for a few plants in the tank so I might just do all herbs and then maybe 1 orchid that I can use as a gunea pig. Either way I won't be setting up the tank for a while, I have to move first lol

Also, fish goo is rich in N, but probably not so rich in other stuff. or maybe differen fish release different stuff in their goo. lol

By the way, I have that same kind of fish. A blue betta! I change water for him about once a week and I dump the water on my plants sometimes.

Well ya, but I didn't want to scare here away! lol