Summer Progress!!

Hi everyone! I hope you are all having a great summer and keeping cool in this scorching heat. The pond is really starting to evolve into something beautiful. The fish are still thriving and happy as far as we can see. I'm hoping this means that our illusive catfish friend hasn't made them sick after all (we still haven't seen him!!). The Koi are getting bigger and the feeders have grown quite a bit also. I wanted to share a few photos of our summer progress around the farm.

We pulled back the plastic liner and dug out a shelf about 2 inches below the water line. We stacked rocks on the shelf and up the pond wall. This is super tedious, but it's starting to look really amazing. The rocks will make a great home to all kinds of wildlife as well. At night we can hear frogs croaking by the pond. I love that.

This is a picture of the upper bog pond that flows down into the big pond. We did the same with the rocks here. The vegetation is really starting to fill in. There are some lily pads to the left that are hard to see in this picture. There is also some parrot feather, which spreads really well. Those are planted directly in the water. I can't wait to add some cone flower, black-eyed Susan, and maybe some more herbs around the edge!

Here is a shot of my favorite Koi. He is so vibrant that when the sun shines on him through the water there is a glowing halo around him. It's hard to get a shot of him poking out of the water, but I'll keep trying. The water plants have multiplied a lot since we put them in. The plant in this picture is water hyacinth. The fish like munching on their roots.

The tilapia are getting big! We figured out that we weren't feeding them enough and that's why it was taking them so long to grow. We feed them three or four times a day now. We feed them fish flakes and Purina AquaMax Fry Starter 100*. We tried to feed them nematodes, but they weren't eating them. I can't say I blame them! The nematodes are supposed to be great for the newborn fry, so we'll try them out on them once they start reproducing. Right now we're trying to figure out the next step for the tilapia. If we put them into the pond they will most likely over- populate. Maybe the answer to that is to have a predator fish or two. But, then the goldfish might get eaten. Or maybe none of the baby tilapia would survive. We also thought about setting up a separate tank system outside and not putting them in the pond at all. It would have to either be filtered by something like a sand filter or be filtered naturally by an aquaponics system. I have a feeling we're going to need more yard :) thanks for reading!!


* AquaMax™ Fry Starter 1001/320.8 mmCrumble - Sink50.17.3