IT ALL STARTS HERE
This is my 125 gallon aquarium or "the breeding grounds". I keep 6 females and 1 male breeders here. Notice the flowerpot "arena", and the PVC pipe hiding spots. The flowerpot will become the male's "office". He will bring a female there after courtship in order to have some privacy while she lays her eggs and he fertilizes them. It is a good Idea to face the flower pot towards the wall of the aquarium so the other females are out of his sight.
The segments of PVC pipe are used by the females in order to hide from the male when they are not in the mood. That is the reason for having six females, he would kill a female in a matter of days if she was the only one in the tank.
THE DELIVERY ROOM/NURSERY
This is one of my 29 gallon tanks. notice the absence of gravel. The bare floor helps the female find any dropped eggs/fry. Also note the window screen covering the inlet to the filter.
It prevents fry from getting sucked into the filter. Tilapia are so hardy, that I have found fry alive inside the filter when I clean it.! One was about 3/4 of an inch in size already.!
Just feed them high protein flakes that you break up into powder with your fingers several times a day.
I use a cheap grain grinder to turn the pond pellets into fine particles for them.
OFF TO THE GREAT OUTDOORS!
This is my 24x48 "cold frame" It is very strong, made of 2" galvanized steel and reinforced plastic. Notice the wind straps and steel cables? yeah, this is definitely Florida.
If you look closely, you will see a gutter extension going from the roof of my house into the structure. This arrangement guides rain water into the "catch of the day" pool inside.
Also on the lower left hand corner you will see what will become "lake Christy", an approximately 20x50 pond. I plan to pipe water in from a couple of the pools in the greenhouse, and pipe it back into the big tank inside.
I will then cultivate duckweed (the Lemna Minor variety) in the pond which will cleanse the water of most of the fish waste while providing a supplemental feeding materal for the fish. Duckweed has more vegetable protein per square meter than soy beans, supposedly.
AAAH! PARADISE!
This are the six 8' diameter pools. The PVC pipe you see in the center is distributing water by gravity from the main filter arrangement on the other side of the sheds. Outlets at the top of each pool deliver the water back by gravity to the big tank on the other side of the sheds. Gravity works! Most of the energy required by fish farms is spent moving water from here to there! I say let gravity do it. (For free). This whole system uses less than 300 watts to operate. (unless I'm running the 1HP backup air blower to add extra oxygen to the water when I'm feeding them.)
"THE BIG TANK"
This is the 5000 gallon tank. It is 10.5 ' in diameter and 6 ft deep all around. I will not elaborate as to how it got here, other than to say it involved a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and about 20 pounds of "baby fat".
The structure on top is an old satelite dish that was here when I purchased this house. Notice the black irrigation pipe coiled on top of the dish. It heats incoming city water to nearly the boiling point on a sunny day. A water pump at the bottom of the tank delivers water to the garbage can, where a lot of the solid waste sinks to the bottom. I built a PVC drainage arrangement that allows me to open a valve and drain whatever has collected at the bottom.
From there the water goes either down to another sump where it is guided through the two bag filters which filter the water to 10 microns (ten times smaller than a human hair), or to the blue filter chambers, which are chock full of filter media. From the filter chambers the water goes to a large biological filter and then it is distributed to the pools on the other side.
The six PVC pipes you see draining into the tank are the outlets from the pools on the other side. See the bug zapper? It delivers yummy barbequed bugs for the fish to feast on.
Oh! the lower right hand corner is full of greek oregano.
But wait! there's more!
THE OTHER SIDE
This is the biological filter. the pipe coming out of the bottom leads to the pools on the other side of the sheds.
THE "CATCH OF THE DAY" TANK
5 bucks at K-mart! (on sale). This 400 gallon pool has the freshest fish in town.! It features filtered heated fresh city water or rain water (see the rain gutters going into it?) It is not part of the recirculating system, so it is sparkling clean. ( No algae or duckweed or any thing else).
Ready to eat Tilapia spend their last week here. The extra clean water purges their system of algae and organic matter found in the recirculating system. This is key to prevent "off taste". That's why the first comment I hear from people who eat my fish is: "it doen't taste fishy!".
The water fountain aereates the water and filters it. (about $90 bucks at w-mart).
Th, tha, that, that's all folks! Improvisation, adaptation, re-use, re-cycle, re-pair, re-build, re-wire, re-claim, re-do it when you screw up, that is what eco-friendly living is all about, as well as survival if the worst actually happens.
Come on! Let's see that wet thumb!!