So... about water quality...

Once you get your system set up, you have your media installed, and you have hooked up a pump to recirculate the water you need to let it run for a week or so to let the good bacteria build up and generally let the system settle.

You want to keep your pH around 7. You also want to make sure that your ammonia levels don't rise too high as ammonia is toxic to the fish. It's a good idea to invest in a good test kit to check your water chemestry. You can usually find a suitable kit at your local fish store.

For the first few months I was pretty religious about checking the chemistry every day to understand how the system was working. Turns out, once it was up and running well the readings were pretty darned stable.

Here's a link to a google docs spreadsheet with all of my chemistry readings for the first couple of months in my first system.

Heres a picture of the system just after I got my first plants in.

The first round of plants were mostly vegetative. Things like lettuce, kale, and cabbage. You can see what I harvested while I was keeping records by looking at the "Harvest" tab in the above spreadsheet.

Here's what the garden looked like in July:

Don't know if you can see all the different plants in your browser, but the tall ones are okra. There is a really nice eggplant on one side and a spaghetti squash trailing down the other. In the back there is some climbing spinach as well as a couple of patio tomatoes and a really nice basil plant.