Home aquaponics kit - possible use for orchids?

[escualida]

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?

[WhiteRabbit]

[isurus79]

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.

[professor plant]

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

[escualida]

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

[tucker85]

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.

[RosieC]

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.

[rosemadder]

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.

[escualida]

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

[isurus79]

Originally Posted by escualida

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....