Aquaponic Garden for Her Community

Hello there!

My name is Andrew Whitchurch, Andy for short. I'm 64, but young at heart. I enjoy learning and facing challenges that go with it. I am a retired engineer from UK. Now I live in Thailand, near the city of Buriram, with my lovely daughter and partner.

I'm so happy with my life at Buriram. My partner is very family oriented. She grows in the soil varieties of organic vegetables at the moment, we have enough for ourselves. Our neighbors are welcome to pick what they need. I like to think that everyone is benefiting. And love in our family spread out also to her community. This has been contagious.

Helping the Community Make Us Happy

My daughter goes to local school. At first the community was interested to see us because we are westerners. Then her teachers and friends came to our place and saw what we do. Ever since then, I was known at her school as a westerner who keeps fish. The way we do the fishery is so new to them. So we get occasional visits for students to observe our fish growing.

That is the story how we find huge satisfaction from just helping the community.

Help Us Build an Aquaponics Garden for the Community

I am a retired engineer and also an experienced Aquaponics growers. Aquaponics became a passion as the quality of the produce and being completely chemical free is a huge benefit to my families health. This way, the best thing I could give to this community would be an Aquaponic garden. This is one that I made in the past:

A full commercial Aquaponics system would cost thousands of dollars. But our aim is to design and build something that was in the reach of everyone.

Aquaponics has never been a business for us although we would sell surplus fresh vegetables at local market prices to benefit the surrounding neighborhood.

We called our Aquaponics garden as a community project because we aimed to supply fresh vegetables and chemical free fish to our neighborhood, so they don't need to travel long distance to get perfect fresh products. They will have them at their door step, priced at market prices or lower, while helping us to cover the maintenance costs.

Budget & Schedule

That now I'm a retired person, I don’t have sufficient funds to carried out this project at once. At the moment it’s really just our family and friends that are involved.

In this campaign, we'd like to raise $500 USD. Your help would be to buy all material needed to complete the fingerlings pond and construction of the growing areas.

If we are lucky enough raise support the first stage would be the fingerling tanks so we can start the the breeding process and confirm our supply of healthy chemical free fish. Secondly the building of water troughs with polystyrene floats for the growing of pesticide free vegetables and fruits on growing area.

UPDATE

Since we posted this project and asked for assistance we have continued to work to the point where our fingerling tanks are almost finished.

Fingerlings ponds will ensure a constant supply of healthy fish.

We also had started to build the fish ponds and growing areas. The funds would help us to create the beds for utilizing the nutrients created by the fish. These beds grow a variety of organically grown vegetables and fruits.

Your donation will be a big help for us. Signs that we're on the right track. In case we don't get enough support, we will keep working on the building and this project will run. It might take longer, but we will push on and finish this project. As we have done up to now, with determination, we believe this will succeed.

For everyone who hears about us, please come to visit. We are a open house and welcome everyone.

The aim of our project is to be able to supply our village with protein rich fish without the long drive to the market and to have a supply of chemical and pesticide free vegetables, these would be sold as cheaply as possible for the benefit of our local villagers.

Finally our local school, which my daughter attends, would involve visits on a regular basis to see the progress of the fish and vegetables and try out to plant seeds, transplant seedlings into the troughs and then monitor. There are lots of handy works as everything grows.

I would be happy if you could use the [Help by sharing] button to share about my project!