I haven’t written much at all…that usually means that we are out and about (on the farm) doing stuff.  The pond is completely dry now; this usually happens every year except for one year which was an unusually wet-dry season.  You would think that the geese would be up in arms with the loss of their swimming pond but they seem to have forgotten about it.  These days, the different goosie factions are securing and taking over designated bucket areas like a bunch of mafia geese.  It can be quite entertaining as each group guards their water stash jealously in the usual goosie-aggressive way…just don’t get caught in the cross-fire!!

We had to save our tilapia frys (I know…it sounds like fried fish but that’s the technical term for them according to size…just means that they are teeny weeny!!) ; we do this every year when the pond dries out.  This time, we had a tonne of them…if you look at the above picture of the pond site, there is a smaller dug out pond on the right side…this was a Gnome idea and it works really well…when the pond dries up, the last bit of water ends up in this little pond with all the fish.  When this happens, Gnome simply goes down and harvests the little fishes with a hand net.  Initially, we had made all sorts of complicated traps but we have found that this is the best hassle-free method of collecting fish.  The fish are in a big container right now being fed chopped greens:

The water was getting quite murky so Gnome had made a swirl filter with a bucket and bits:

The fish water is pumped up through the top pipe in the swirl filter; the middle pipe is the out-flow for the filtered water and  there is a lower pipe (which you can’t see) which can be opened to release all the gunk.  Yes….you’ve got it!!  This is the start of our aqua-ponics project…:)

Anyway, Gnome says there are too many fishes in the container so we have to start harvesting them.  I am thinking of making an anchovy type of thing with them…I don’t know how to do this so I will have read up on the preservation method.  Have a great weekend every-one!!