You’re listening to Fish Grow Plants—A podcast all about practicing and sharing the love of aquaponics; hosted by Logan Schoolcraft.
Hello, and welcome to Fish Grow Plants! In today’s episode we’ll be discussing the fish routine; or said differently, the processes you have when dealing with your fish!
I’m a strong creature of habit for a lot of stuff I do. The good news for me is that if I can control my habits, I can control a lot of what and how I do things. What do I mean? Well, how about this for an example:
My daily routines around my aquaponics, microgreens, and potted plants are pretty set. My morning routine includes watering microgreens and feeding fish (as a minimum), at lunch it’s water the potted plants, and in the evening, I tend to the fish again and rewater the microgreens. I thought this was just a reasonable pattern to have that worked for me in current situation. But, as I’ve recently found out, it’s more than that.
I’ve been watching a couple of old dogs for a week or so now and a surprising thing happened—they picked up my routines! I mean, we tend to support each other in reinforcing our habits. If I’m early, I’ll wake them up, but if I’m late, they start pacing and trying to get my attention. It was really weird the first few times this happened, but once I figured out what was going on, I had to ask myself, “am I really this habitual?”
Guess I am.
Maybe by now you can see this story is hinting at the point of having a routine. Perhaps you don’t have to be as strict as I apparently am, but a routine helps in a lot of ways.
So let’s look at a routine for working around your fish. What would be good to include and how can you do that? Well here’s a short list that you might want to think about:
- Inspecting (this also includes talking to and doing general practitioner work)
- Feeding (usually several times a day)
- Hardware checks (you don’t want those pumps to go out on your friends, do you?) And
- Leak checks (you don’t your fish running out of water do you?)
Alright, that’s a pretty short list, and depending on how long you talk with your fish, it can probably be done on the order of just a few minutes.
Just in case you are looking to have more revolving rounds of fish and not long-term pets, you might want to think about adding these additional steps to your routine:
- Harvesting, or cleaning the fish for eating
- Actually eating or selling your fish; and
- Records (the more fish you have, the more records you’ll have, so being able to compare what you are doing great at where you need to improve would be advantageous)
Can I give you a routine to follow?
No.
Why not?
Well, everyone has a different setup and different needs and purposes for their system. In my case, I don’t intend on eating my goldfish, so I just try to make sure they are happy and healthy when I drop in on them a couple of times a day. I’m not doing production work here, so it’s ok for me to spend more time talking to my fish than thinking about how much I just fed them. And if you live in a much cooler place than me, you might have totally different fish, and require a completely different routine (like checking on heaters in the greenhouse or water tanks).
So have no fear. Just remember what you need to do and go after it. It is OK to make a big sticky note and put it up so you can follow it until you have it all by memory. If you do use a sticky note, it probably won’t be long that one day you’ll look at it and wonder what it’s for (since you forgot to remove it and just let it collect dust!)
My last bit of advice would be that if you love your fish, don’t worry. You’re going to want to do everything you can for them, and your routine will form out of that love. See, you already have it all inside of you…maybe just help coax it out!
Take care and happy aquaponicing!
This has been another episode of Fish Grow Plants—the podcast all about practicing and sharing the love of aquaponics; hosted by Logan Schoolcraft.
https://fishgrowplants.libsyn.com/aquaponic-processfish-routine