Fish in a barrel

I played around with aquaponics on a very small scale a few years ago.  I had a small tank of ornamental fish in a classroom.  The water stayed pristine, the fish thrived and the plants did remarkably well.  

My kids have been bugging me for a few years to get fish again.  We have no space in the house for a tank.  I do have some barrels outside, so thought I could put fish in one of them.  

Goldfish are hardy and long lived.  They can survive in clean water as well as dirty water, they can survive in warm water as well as under ice.  Goldfish can eat a wide range of foods, many of which I can grow for free and I will only need to buy some of their food.  So I decided to get some goldfish.

One problem I faced is that goldfish are expensive here.  Locally they are about $9 each for smaller, not very colourful fish, and more for better looking or larger fish.  

Then I found a place online that posts live fish.  They had a deal where I could get ten posted to me for much the price I would have spent buying three locally.  I have never had fish posted before, but they had a live fish guarantee so I figured I would give it a go.  

I could have bought ten comet goldfish, or the same price to get ten shubunkin goldfish, so I had to make a decision. 

Goldfish when they arrived in the post

I love shubunkin, they are prettier than most common goldfish and have an array of colours.  Comets tend to be orange, or sometimes have a little white.

The choice was easy enough to make.  I ordered some shubunkin goldfish.

Shubunkin tend to be less inbred than many other varieties of goldfish, they have short single fins, and long bodies, meaning that they suffer from fewer of the ailments that often kill fancy goldfish. They are colourful and meant to be one of the hardier breeds.

Who knew goldfish cope so well being posted interstate!

When the fish first arrived they were terrified, and were rather pale in colour.  All were alive and looked remarkably well.

They were active and it didn't take them long to colour up quite a lot.  In the beginning they tried to stay down the bottom of the barrel where it was difficult to see them.  They were scared, and I was worried that some would die in the first few days while the barrel was cycling.  I put some wire over the top to protect my new fish from birds.

For the first few days I fed them duckweed and mosquito wrigglers.  That way they could eat when they wanted and not have to worry about me looming overhead.  After they associated me with food I started to also feed fish food.  Now they come to the top of the barrel anytime they hear me.  I now feed them some fish food.  They are remarkably interactive fish, which makes feeding time quite fun.

I keep hearing how goldfish don't stop eating and will gorge themselves and eat to death, but mine only eat a little fish food and then stop.  If I put a lot of duckweed on they will eat a lot, and then stop.  Some times it takes a few days for them to eat all the duckweed.

Goldfish, duckweed, and floating plants

I bought a little submersible pump/filter, floated a pot of plants to help remove some nitrates, and have plans for a flood/drain grow bed for when the weather warms up.  Until I put in a grow bed I am also doing 10% water changes each week, this water goes to the vegetable garden or to fruit trees so nothing is wasted.

Most days I put a scoop of duckweed on the top of the water.  The duckweed is great but only lasts a little while before my fish eat it.  Luckily I have a lot of it growing in other containers so I can scoop more of it in each day.  I also give them scoops of azolla but they struggle to eat that because their mouths are a bit too small.  

Some of the larger azolla has stayed there for a long time, I am happy with this as it would be removing a tiny amount of the nutrients from the water. 

I try to always have a little duckweed or azolla in there so they always have something to eat.  They seem to prefer duckweed to fish food.

My barrel full of fish

I am not a photographer and find it almost impossible to photograph fish.  They are beautifully coloured, each is uniquely coloured, they are very active, rather interactive, and the kids find them interesting to watch.  

I got them mid March and they have doubled in size over the past month or so.  The plants in the floating pot have also exploded in growth, which is a good sign that they are removing some of the nutrients from the water.  At first the fish were eating all the roots, but now the roots are growing faster than they are being eaten.

I know that ten fish are a lot for one barrel.  But I have a few plans for the future which should help a lot.  I am excited to see how much these little guys colour up after they have had some sunlight and more live food.

If you look closely you can see some of my fish when they were new

The fish are growing larger and calmer

The plants are growing well

Shubunkin feeding time

Winter will be here before I know it, and my little fish won't be very active until the weather warms up again.  

If my little fish survive the winter they should be large enough to breed in spring.  I plan to put in a spawning mop and see what happens.  If they lay eggs on the spawning mop I will remove it and put it in another tank and try to grow out some of the fry.

For now I am just enjoying these lovely creatures and watching them grow.

FOUR MONTH UPDATE: I now pump the water through a milk bottle full of gravel.  This has increased biological filtration and provides greater aeration.  I still have ten goldfish, they all have grown a lot and their colours are beautiful.  Being winter they are moving very slow.  The plants in the floating pot of gravel have increased in size dramatically and even in mid-winter I have started to harvest the Vietnamese Coriander!

Mystery fly

A while ago I looked into a bucket of water that was in my garden and found a fly.  It looks like no other fly I have ever seen.  I once studied entomology among other things, and I tend to notice insects.  

This fly was dead, so I pulled it out of the bucket and took some photos (as you do).

It looks similar to a hover fly, but with weird white stuff and shiny parts.  The underside is kind of green.  At first I thought perhaps it was a hover fly and the white stuff was a parasite or something stuck onto the fly.  After closer inspection it appears that the white stuff is just part of the fly.

If anyone knows what this is I would love to learn more.

Mystery fly

Green underneath the fly

Green underneath

Shiny back

Maidenhair fern babies

I love maidenhair ferns, they are such graceful plants.  

I got a tiny maidenhair fern back in 2016 as an office fern, and since then it has grown huge.  The fronds are now about 50-60cm long. 

My Maidenhair fern

I also bought a variegated maidenhair fern, I didn't look after it very well so it has not grown as large.  The variegated form of Maidenhair ferns is exquisite.  

Variegated Maidenhair fern

As well as these older, well established ferns, I also have some baby maidenhair ferns.  

I transplanted a bunch into a pot in early January so they would have some room to grow, but still be in one pot so would be simple to care for.  

My timing was a mistake as it was too hot and windy on that day.  As you can see below the fronds got scorched a little.

Planted early January

 

I think that all of the tiny ferns survived, they grew and look healthy.  They are large enough to transplant into separate pots, but I think I will wait for spring before I do that. 

These ones I have grown outside under shelter rather than taking up space inside the house.  They probably need a little more light, but overall they are going ok. 

Mid April

Ready to be divided

I'm not sure what I will do with these little ones.  I plan to separate them into different pots in spring.  Maybe I will sell some, maybe I will keep all of them.  They sure are lovely little plants.

Sarracenia psittacina golf ball form

Late last winter or early spring a very generous person sent me a small plant of Sarracenia psittacina (golf ball form).  I believe he imported seeds and grew this plant from them.   

Sarracenia psittacina is a lovely looking plant, and I have read about the golf ball form.  The few pictures I had seen had large round heads on the pitchers and brilliant colouration.  The few descriptions I had read made it sound like a strong growing plant.

It is a really nice looking plant, my photos do not do it justice.  As I type this I realise that it is now quite a lot larger than it was in any of these photos, I haven't got around to take any more recent pictures.

Look so much larger once repotted

 

When it arrived, the plant was small, but looked very healthy.  It also had a seedling of what appears to be a hybrid Sarracenia tucked under it.  

I didn't want to damage either plant so I left them together to grow larger before attempting to divide them.

The plants not long after they arrived

As I planted them I snapped one of the young pitchers.  You can see it in the photo above.  Not a great start, but the plant seemed to forgive me for this and started growing pretty much straight away.

As the plants grew, the psittacina grew faster and larger than the hybrid.  It got so large that I forgot that I still had the little hybrid.  If you look closely below you can still see it in the pot.

It grew quickly

Before I knew it my plant needed a larger pot.  I kept saying to myself that I would repot it later, and I kept putting it off.  It didn't take long for the plant to be far too large for its tiny pot.

Needed repotting and dividing

It looks a bit silly having such a large plant in such a tiny pot.  It probably would have grown even faster had it been in a larger pot earlier.

This needed to go into a larger pot

It is amazing how much larger plants look once they are in a decent sized pot.  

I separated the two plants and put the hybrid in its own little pot.  The tiny hybrid still looks healthy enough.

repotted and divided

I really like Sarracenia psitticina golf ball form.  I hope I can over winter it successfully and see just how large it will grow next year.

Two harvests of honey

This year we had one large harvest of liquid honey early in the season, I also cut out some honey comb, then things went awry.  Since then things have picked up a little.

After the first harvest I left the supers on and the bees started to fill them again, they drew out some frames to replace the comb I had taken.  

Last weekend I needed to remove a super and pack my hives down a little before winter, the only sensible way for me to do that was to remove the honey and get the bees to clean things up a little, so I got a few jars of honey out of one of the supers. 

Below are jars from the each of the two harvests.  Honey from the first harvest was light in colour and thinner, while honey from the second was far darker.  The darker honey tastes far nicer, it is much thicker, and smells really floral.

I find it incredible how different the two crops of honey are.  They both came from the same hive, with the same queen, in the same location  It makes perfect sense to be different as there were different things blooming at the time, but I still find it fascinating.

New honey on left, old honey on right