Due to their design, not all plants are suitable for cultivation in aquaponics and hydroponic systems. Here is an, always incomplete, overview of suitable plants.
Here you can find empirical values on pH and EC values for plants, herbs and vegetables.
The division between fruits, vegetables and herbs is not a biological one. It also varies from culture to culture.
Fruits and vegetables are not generic terms for specific plant species. A clear definition is difficult. Could you say that fruit is sweet and vegetables are not? This is almost always true, but carrots, for example, can also taste sweet and you can make juice out of them. They do have a significantly lower sugar content than apples or oranges, but that's not really a satisfactory criterion. Because then you would have to set a certain sugar content as a limit and say: everything above that is considered fruit, everything else is considered vegetables. That would then be a rather arbitrary quantitative criterion.
But there is another feature that very few people think about: vegetables are almost always annual plants; They last for one season, then they have to be sown or planted again. Here too, there are many exceptions, starting with potatoes. Fruit often grows on trees or bushes that live for several years or even decades. There are exceptions to this too, but there are far fewer of them: asparagus, for example, would be such a perennial vegetable, as would artichokes.
Mixed definition: decision on a case-by-case basis.
In fact, we probably use a mixed definition in our heads. We have several criteria at hand and if several criteria contradict each other, we intuitively weigh them up and decide on a case-by-case basis what fits best. So: Asparagus is perennial, but it is not sweet and we don't eat the fruit, but rather the shoots - so we count it as a vegetable. Rhubarb is also perennial, we eat the shoots and even cook it – but it is eaten sweet, so we mostly count it as fruit.
Parts of the article were taken from GÁBOR PAÁL. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 .
Overview of successfully grown plants in hydroponics & aquaponics
