Murray Hallam – Aquaponics The First 12 Months
What makes it more intriguing is that it’s about our system at Ecofilms. When it was installed over a year ago, we decided to film its construction from start to finish and document its good and bad points over the course of 6 Months – the critical period for Aquaponics systems as they mature.
That period stretched out over Summer, Autumn and Winter and we decided to wait and follow its journey over the entire 12 Month period and have Murray Hallam inspect the system every month or so and comment on how it was developing.
Our knowledge in Aquaponics was quite new and we wanted to discover the way an aquaponics system develops the way a new user would encounter it – the ups and downs of running an Aquaponics system from start to finish. The finish part meant the bit where you actually harvest and eat your fish – something we didn’t really anticipate doing. When we first got our fish they were tiny so we never expected them to grow more than the size of goldfish. But grow they did. We also wanted to do a faithful interpretation of what it was like to do something without any prior knowledge in fish rearing or plant growing. If the fish all died – then that would be the end of the story. We intended to film the evolution of our system and include it as a rolling segment in the Aquaponics Secrets DVD. But what happend was as we were making the Secrets video we realized that this was a separate story altogether. it had a momentum of its own. The fish were all growing well. The plants were just popping out of the growbeds like they were on steroids – it was an amazing experience.
We managed to grow the sort of things we have never grown before or were difficult to grow. Vegetables like Broccoli. You stuck a seedling into the growbed and that was that. The system just took over. A month or two later – up came the broccoli floret. No pesticides or sprays needed. This Aquaponics thing really does work well! No wonder people that had a system like this were addicted. So we kept filming our system as the months rolled on.
Eventually we had enough material to make a great documentary. One that would work best on its own as a separate title. It had never been our intention to film our system as a separate title – but this is what happened – and the journey was well worth the wait.
At this stage we aren’t sure whether to release it as a DVD title or digital download file. Maybe both. Let us know if you’d prefer to watch it online. Murray is a fantastic presenter and this title really shows the evolution of an aquaponics system from start to finish. At the end of 12 months – we felt like experts!
