Dr. Nate Storey: So what crops to start with is one of the most common questions for beginning
aquaponic growers.
It's kind of a complicated question.
You've got climate concerns.
You have growing space concerns.
All of these things are things you should be thinking about.
But in just about any case, just about any scenario, we can recommend a few crops to
start with.
One of them is bok choy.
Right here, you see towers of bok choy growing.
This is a plant in the mustard family.
Most of the mustards do really well in aquaponic systems.
But we really like bok choy because it grows in hot weather.
It grows in relatively cold weather.
And it produces really, really nice yields for us.
This is what bok choy looks like growing in towers.
We're going to walk around and look at a few other greens crops, herbs crops, and fruiting
crops.
Lettuce is another crop that grows really well in these systems right off the bat.
The one concern with lettuce is that it can have some bug issues.
So keep that in mind before you start growing it.
Know how you're going to control things like aphids.
But this is a romaine here, and we grow a lot of romaine.
We grow some butter head.
One of our more recent lettuce varieties that we really like is one called the Amish deer
tongue.
It grows really nicely in towers.
It's got good flavor, and it's a great heirloom variety of lettuce.
Swiss chard is another really great crop.
It's really nutrient dense, and people really love it.
It's got a great flavor.
I will say, though, that it prefers cooler weather to warmer weather.
Another nice thing about Swiss chard is that you can do multiple harvests.
Here you can see that we've harvested off of these towers for a while now.
We just keep on cutting away the outside stalks, the outside leaves, and kind of the inner
crown, the core of the plant just keeps on growing.
That's a really nice aspect to crops like Swiss chard.
Kale can be a really nice crop for towers as well.
Here we've got some good Tuscan kale.
This has been growing for a little while.
Most of this we send out through our CSA, so it allows us to just pick off the outer
leaves, let the main stalk keep growing, and we can get a lot of harvest out of this kale
over the coming weeks and even months.
Another crop that we really like are collard greens.
You can see we've been growing these for a while.
We've been sending these out through our CSA.
We're just picking off the outside leaves and letting kind of that main stalk keep growing.
These, honestly, we've been harvesting on for several months now.
It's a great crop.
It's very nutrient dense.
It's healthy.
It's delicious.
It's just an all-around great crop for hot weather, cold weather, just about any kind
of weather, really.
This is a great crop for beginning aquaponic growers.
Fennel is a great herb for beginners.
Now I will say that it has a really large stature, and you can kind of see how crazy
these towers are getting here.
It's a large-statured herb, but it's really delicious.
Now if you like fennel tops, you can harvest the fennel tops for a while without actually
harvesting the bulb.
This is the bulb down here.
It's not a true bulb, but you get the idea.
It's just an all-around great herb.
It likes longer day length.
If you're trying to grow this in the winter, you're going to have terrible luck.
If you're trying to grow it in the spring or the fall, you're not going to have great
luck.
But if you're in the summer, and it's a little bit cooler where you live, fennel can be a
really productive, really delicious herb to grow.
There are a lot of herb that beginning growers, whether you're hydroponic or aquaponic, can
grow.
They can be really, really delicious additions to your dishes, and they can supplement the
flavors of your greens and your other crops really, really nicely.
Basil is one of those.
This is not, I would say, an easy crop to grow, necessarily.
But, it's well worth the effort.
It loves a lot of sun, so wait until you have good sunlight hours to start growing it.
You can see this is a brand new tower that was planted a week or two ago.
In towers it grows very nicely.
In most aquaponic systems it will grow fairly well.
There are some issues with it, but it's certainly worth the attempt for all of the flavor, and
all of the things that it can add to your dishes and to your cooking.
Chives are a great starter crop for beginners, because they're really productive, and they're
really forgiving.
It takes them a while to get going, so if you plant from seed, or if you can take basically
divided bulbs from someone's garden, something like that, it takes a little while to get
established.
But when you're first starting, plant them right on top of each other, and within a few
months, you're going to have a really dense tower of chives that you can cut again and
again and again, for years sometimes.
Mint is another really nice herb to grow, because it's really easy to grow, and it's
really tolerant of a lot of abuse.
We grow mint, and I will warn you, it gets a little bit out of control, so you kind of
want to contain it.
If you're growing in towers you're fine.
Basically, the towers will kind of contain the roots, and it's not going to spread to
other towers, something like that.
But if you are growing in a bed, you need to be concerned about the mint plants actually
kind of spreading out and taking over the whole bed.
Its a very simple crop to grow.
Its very tolerant of a lot of different water conditions.
If you drink a lot of mint juleps or a lot of tea, it's worth growing a number of plants
of mint, in just about any beginning hydro or aquaponic setup.
One of the last herbs that I always recommend to beginning growers is, of course, parsley.
This is an Italian big leaf.
It's really delicious stuff.
It's good in a lot of different dishes, kind of like basil.
It grows really nicely.
It's pretty easy to grow.
It's tolerant of cool weather, of relatively warm weather.
You do got to watch it.
It does like to kind of go to flower and go to seed on occasion, especially once it gets
real hot.
But by and large, it's a really nice herb that grows very well in towers as well as
conventional aquaponic systems.
A lot of beginning growers, whether they're aquaponic or hydroponic, have questions about
fruiting crops, things like strawberries and cucumbers and tomatoes.
By and large, I tell folks to stay away from things like tomatoes and cucumbers.
But as you can see here, we're growing a few strawberries.
These were actually just planted about a week and a half ago.
They're coming along really nicely for their age.
Strawberries grow pretty well.
They grow really nicely in these towers, and they don't get so full statured that they
become a problem.
They're also not quite the nutrient hogs that things like tomatoes are.
Even though I know you want to put tomatoes in, as a beginning grower, I would recommend
you stay away from tomatoes.
Learn on the crops that we've gone through today.
Learn on things like greens and herbs.
If you've got to do something fruiting, maybe try something like strawberries.
Stay away from those really nutrient-demanding crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, and of course,
those kind of large-statured vining crops.
I hope that this is all really useful to you today.
If you have any questions, please feel free to post them below.
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For most hobbyists, you're buying mixed fertilizer solution.
So you're buying a liquid mix.
A good example of it would be something like this stuff.