The Hardware and the Harvest: Tarps.com and The Aquaponic Source

For more than 25 years, Tarps.com has supplied the tarps, canopies, and metal fittings that hold up construction sites, farms, and backyard projects across the country. As you might expect, our usual customer base uses our parts to create carports, RV covers, canopy kits. These are valuable and effective ways that our fittings can be used. But one very unique and exciting relationship we've built in recent years is with a company solving a very different kind of problem: how to grow more food, with less water, in less space.

That company is The Aquaponic Source.

The Aquaponic Source designs and builds custom aquaponics, hydroponics, and aquaculture systems for a wide range of growers. Their client list runs from homeowners in the Pacific Northwest building a greenhouse that's as much a design statement as it is a growing space, to schools in California, to commercial operations that need production systems they can rely on every day. What ties all of it together is decades of engineering experience adapted to fit each grower's footprint and goals, rather than a one-size-fits-all system.

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, aquaponics is a food production method that combines aquaculture (raising fish) with hydroponics (growing plants without soil) in a single closed-loop system. Fish waste supplies natural nutrients to the water, that nutrient-rich water feeds the plants, and the plants filter and clean the water before it's recirculated back to the fish. The result is a self-sustaining cycle that uses a fraction of the water required by traditional soil-based farming, produces two forms of food output (fish and produce) from one system, and can run year-round regardless of outdoor growing conditions. It's an approach that scales from a small backyard setup to a full commercial operation, which is part of why it's become popular with everyone from hobbyist homeowners to school science programs to production-scale growers.

For growers who want to focus purely on plant production without the added complexity of raising fish, the Aquaponic Source's Growasis line offers a dedicated DWC solution (or deep water culture). Growasis systems are built as scalable growing troughs, available in three configurations (ground level, elevated to waist height, or a stacked double-decker model) so they can function as a standalone operation or as an addition to an existing aquaponic, hydroponic, or aquaculture setup.

This is where Tarps.com's supply chain becomes part of the story.

Every Growasis frame depends on a network of joints and connectors to keep it structurally sound, and that's a category we know well. Tarps.com supplies the galvanized steel metal fittings used in the construction of these frames — the same category of hardware we've spent 25-plus years refining for canopies, greenhouses, and outdoor shelter builds. Our fittings are manufactured from heavy-duty galvanized steel with a silver zinc coating, precision-welded into consistent, true angles, and built to resist the corrosion that comes with constant exposure to moisture. Those are exactly the properties a DWC frame requires, given that the entire structure exists to house standing water and humid growing conditions day after day.

Our combination of reliability and availability is part of what makes it possible for The Aquaponic Source to scale a system up or down to fit a customer's space. A ground-level system can go in this month. A waist-high or double-decker configuration can be planned around fittings that are already proven, already in inventory, and already priced competitively.

It's a good reminder that our hardware’s uses are limited only by imagination. We didn't design our metal fittings with aquaponics in mind. We designed them to be strong, weather-resistant, and easy to assemble without specialized tools. It turns out those are exactly the qualities a well-engineered growing system needs from the ground up.

We're proud to supply a piece of what The Aquaponic Source builds. They've spent decades helping people grow food more efficiently, whether that's a single greenhouse in a backyard or a full production system for a commercial grower, and it means something to know our fittings are part of how those systems come together and stay standing.

To see the kind of systems this hardware supports, visit The Aquaponic Source's blog. And for growers or builders looking to source the metal fittings behind their own frame, Tarps.com remains ready to supply what the build requires.