Your AquaSprouts Garden is very much like keeping fish in an ordinary aquarium… but a little bit easier. You’ll still need to feed them and maintain good water quality - a catchall term for a variety of chemical and physical characteristics of an aquatic environment - but your plants will be helping you out by absorbing the waste products that can otherwise accumulate and necessitate regular water changes to prevent them reaching toxic levels. That means less work for you, and happier, healthier fish!

There are tons of different fish varieties that will thrive in your aquaponic garden, but here are a few great combinations to consider if you don’t know where to start:

Amazonia

8 neon tetras (or 5-6 lemon tetras, bloodfin tetras, or bleeding heart tetras)
4-6 dwarf or pygmy Corydoras catfish (or 2-3 larger Cory cats)
Amazon river decor - natural gravel, artificial sword plants, and aquarium-safe wood

Tiger Stripes

5 tiger barbs
2-4 kuhli loaches
Dark decorations will highlight the contrasting stripes of the fish, and a slightly finer gravel size will allow the kuhli loaches to dig

Infinite Fish

4 or more mollies, platies, or guppies. Watch out with this one! These fish are all members of the same family, and they’re livebearers - that means they give live birth rather than laying eggs. This makes them very easy to breed in an aquarium, so as long as you have one or more pairs of healthy adults, the chances you’ll get offspring are quite good. You may get more than you know what to do with!