Yellow Star
Yellow Star

When Sameer A (42) an IT professional came across a book that taught the techniques of aquaponics in 2016, he was hooked!

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Yellow Star

The techie decided to try it out for himself.

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Yellow Star

“The thought of growing food without soil and some fish in water was fascinating to me,” says the Pune-based engineer.

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Yellow Star

To experiment with the concepts described in the book, he took two buckets lying in the corner of the roof of his bungalow, installed a water pump, and bought some pipes and some fish.

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Yellow Star
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Yellow Star

After a week of planting mint in this set-up, Sameer found his efforts to be successful when fresh leaves began sprouting.

“This is how the concept of ‘bucketponics’ came into being,” he says. “The book mentioned that fish excreta in water worked as a source of ammonia and nitrate, which are essential elements for plants to grow. This was proved right in my experiment,” he adds.

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Yellow Star

From growing one mint plant, the urban farmer has gone on to cultivate 65 varieties of vegetables on his terrace farm — including spinach, tomato, cucumber, rice, corn, stevia and gourd.

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Yellow Star

After one year of experimenting, Sameer finalised a design of a double-decker tub made from Fibre Reinforced Plastic (FRP).

The vegetables are grown on the upper tub, while the fish live in another tub installed below. The water from the lower tub is pumped upwards to water the plants, which again drains down into the lower tub for recycling.

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Yellow Star

Sameer has experimented with different types of fish to refine his technique. These include the catfish, guppy, rohu, katla, and koi. But he discovered that koi helps yield the highest amount of produce!

For any queries on urban farming you can contact Sameer on his Instagram page, Pluckit.

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