Have you ever had something that you know works, but you don’t really like it? My first car was an old Ford Courier pickup. It was baby blue, two wheel drive, had a pinto engine, I bought it  cheap. I put paneling on the doors and a cheap stereo in it, and it did everything I needed it to do. Until a friend at school pulled in driving a classic Toyota Landcruiser.

In some ways my journey of growing things has been a lot like that old truck. I love to eat things I grew myself. I love the process of planting, cultivating, and harvesting. I love a full root cellar, and a canning pantry lined with the years produce. I love knowing what has gone into my food. But it has also always seemed like a bit of a battle. Fighting weeds, insects, fungus, soil analysis, mineral contents, I am constantly reminded that our world is broken. We see that it was made to grow things, and that it doesn’t grow them the way it’s supposed to. But for some reason every year I tilled and planted and fought, and if all went well harvested. And then some 10 years ago I discovered aquaponics.

I was initially attracted to growing fish, and to this day still love doing so. But the idea of a symbiotic relationship in which the fish waste can feed the plant seemed so beautiful. And then I began to learn about hydroponics, deep water beds, media beds, and most recently wicking beds. While each growing system has their own pluses and minuses, I find wicking beds to be the most useful all around growing beds. I have been able to grow literally anything I wish in them, they deal with the mineral content issues, I can easily supplement plants when they need additional nutrients. But I believe the biggest plus for wicking beds is they actually re-create a growing environment that reflects the way the earth was initially created.

Now I realize there is lots of debate about the age of the earth, evolution and creation, etc. I am a creationist. There is simply insufficient scientific evidence and too many anomalies and contradictions within evolution for me to embrace the theory on its own merits. I can’t see any benefits to the evolutionary framework, and I don’t have enough faith to tie my life to such flimsy fantasy and poor science. Having said that, I want to clarify. What I specifically reject is the theory of evolution between species, and that our world evolved all these amazing life forms over billions of years from essentially nothing. No matter how hard, or how far back you go, eventually evolution ends up pulling a rabbit out of a hat, where something has to come from nothing.

The book of Genesis in the Bible claims that in its original form, the earth was watered by waters from below the ground that would come up from below and water the earth. It also suggests there was some sort of water layer around the earth likely creating a greenhouse effect that essentially made the earth an extremely stable, temperate, consistently warm environment. As I have learned about and developed aquaponics systems over the last 10 years, my underlying idea has been to re-create this microcosm of Eden – A warm, environmentally stable growing climate watered from below. The current result? I have few weeds, don’t have to set up any sprinklers, and my plants have an ideal growing environment. Depending on what I am growing I have the capacity to adjust the environmental parameters to give any particular crop ideal conditions.

Now that doesn’t mean wicking beds are perfect. They take effort to set up, they are soil dependent, so you still have to watch and manage your beds. But their nutrients are derived from the constant flow of fish nutrient flowing through them. And the warmth and biological cultures contained create a perfect environment for constant soil composition.

Check out the makeup and details of how we do wicking beds