Something Fishy

Taken last summer. Lilies haven't bloomed yet this year

Our garden pond is not an elaborate thing of water falls and pumps and fancy fountains. It is instead a 300-gallon Rubbermaid stock tank, intended for the watering needs of cows and horses. When I first wanted a pond we were not in a position to buy one. However, I had a job feeding a neighbor's horse and it paid enough to buy a watering trough.

It doesn't look too awful either. I wouldn't trade it for anything fancier, because the maintenance of it is virtually negligible. If I am not forced to drain it, it balances right up and stays fairly clear. This year I am not even running its little el-cheapo Walmart fountain.

Used to be, the first decade or so that we had it, I could winter fish and frogs in it pretty easily. Then the last two or three years winters have been so cold that it froze solid to the bottom. 

Thus we do our best to relocate any summering frogs to more suitable water features and bring the goldfish in the house.

This year six made it through the winter in an aquarium and back out to the pond.
 All orange. 
There seem to be four of those surviving.

The kids bought two more white-and-orange ones and four really pretty guppies.

I don't usually feed the fish in summer as the pond keeps them pretty well fed. However, since I wanted to see the guppies every day....did I mention that they are pretty?....I took to feeding them.

What should show up in the middle of the feeding frenzy but a huge, natural-colored (that is brown) carp goldfish. At first, since I didn't see the kids' fish when they put them in, I assumed it was a new one they bought, but, nope, they don't know anything about it.

The only thing I can figure is that is somehow escaped capture last fall, even though we nearly drained the tank, and survived the long, cold winter. There was one giant frog that we missed last fall that appeared to have made it through, although it sure looked rough when it emerged this spring, so anything is possible.

At any rate, it sure was a surprise!

Surprise from the Garden Pond

Look closely, now. This is the base of one of the water cannas, the big variegated one, which I brought inside and placed in a ten-gallon fish tank full of water.

I like to keep them going from year to year so they bloom in the pond, which this one did, quite enthusiastically. A couple of days after it came in I spotted these tiny brown specks all over the inside of the tank. They are growing fast now and it is much easier to tell what they are.

See them? Tiny, baby snails.

Wordless Wednesday

New meaning

To the concept of layering

Froggy Bubble Bath

Afternoon at the garden pond 2008

It amazes me how every summer the garden pond looks totally different from the summer before.... even though I don't plan it that way. Some summers, entirely serendipitously, purple and pink will be the theme colors (I plant a lot of mixes and never know what to expect). Other years orange or red will prevail. This season summery yellow, brown, and orange seems to have taken pride of place. The giant brown-eyed Susan sort of things grew from a wildflower mix I planted last year. They just sort of took over, but I like them.
Still I am going to dig some up and put them out in the wilder part of the lawn so they don't take over. A friend gave me the tiger lilies a couple years ago and they really came into their own this year.


In the pond, besides gold fish, guppies and pseudo koi (which seem to be oddly marked goldfish) and the sunfish, there is an odd assortment of wild minnows that we caught at various locations. One of them is a sucker mouth minnow Alan got in the Schoharie two years ago. At the time it was a tiny thread, perhaps 1/4 inch long and barely even visible. Now it is the size of a cigar and the water fairly boils when it surges up after fish pellets.

A guppy, surviving outdoors despite the big sun fish
that we can't catch to get him out of the pond...

Gold fish begging and slurping up fish pellets.

A very welcome visitor.

View from the south.

Got water?

Weather fellas say two or three inches yesterday morning. I say I hate it when it thunders when we are milking. So much metal around. And nervous cows. It knocked the power out for a while, which is why there was only a wimpy post yesterday. When the lightning started making the lights flash on and off I just unplugged everything and went to the barn...




I am having algae problems in the pond so I changed the fountain. We have been hearing toads every night and I thought they were here.


However, thanks to having to reset the bedroom digital clock late last night....by guess and by gosh......


And getting it wrong........ so I got up half an hour early and went out with the dog in the not quite dawn.


I discovered that they are instead down in the heifer barn watering trough. Chlorinated water. Emptied and refilled every couple of days. Heifers snorting around in it.....Hmmm.......




They don't know what they are missing.

Thunder boomers, koi and calf relocations

The first right while we were milking last night. Nothing serious, just got us wet with a good rain. We needed it. One upshot of that was a toad serenade last night. (I think they were partying down in the garden pond.) Amphibians, except for red backed salamanders, have been mighty scarce this spring. Dry weather I guess. Anyhow, it seems wonderful to me that something as homely as a toad has such a lovely song.

Actually right from the get go we had an amazing day yesterday. Thanks to Teri at Farm Life we discovered Craigslist. Now we check the local farm and gardens listings several times a day. Thus we discovered that someone over by Mariaville Lake had baby koi for sale for two bucks each. We all made the trip over and bought seven. However, the nice lady whose front yard pond is apparently teeming with little orange, silver, white and black fishies, threw in three extras.

Now if they will just stay IN the pond. We have had a terrible time with koi jumping out in the past. I am hoping they grow and thrive.

Only four of our old gold fish made it through to warm weather, although they all survived the winter. They contracted a terrible bacterial disease just as the weather warmed up though and died in droves. I am sure we would have been fine, but the spring fed watering trough where we have kept most of them for the past twenty years or so dried up and we had to put all those fish in the garden pond last fall. Not good. Way too crowded.

This is Carlene. We needed to get this door open for ventilation
so we needed to move her to a big stall

Then we went out to help the boss clean the barn. We took calf registration photos, cleaned stalls and moved some older calves into regular stalls. One the was tied in front of a door we needed to open to get some air into the barn. It was so much more comfortable last night with it open.

Carlene's other side. These photos will go on her registration papers

At night we had an "end of internship and two kids graduating" sort of party with pizza, calzone, grinders, French fries and the new National Treasure movie. (Grumpy old party pooper mom read a John Grisham novel, but stayed in the vicinity.)

It was nice. A really great day. I feel lucky. Maybe it is was the koi

This is the herb garden, honey locust tree
and part of the flowers around the garden pond...which you can't see.

Which do you prefer?

Fresh fish on ice?

Or really, really fresh fish under ice?

Kitties on the garden pond two by two

Wait a minute! There's Max, but where did Teak go?



******Update-there she is!

Still more company

I glanced out at the garden pond yesterday to see an odd creature leaping futilely against the side of it. It was the right size for a sparrow or chipmunk, but it just didn't look right somehow. I grabbed the camera and ran out in the rain to find this guy trying to get in out of the weather. I think it would normally have been an easy hop for so big a green frog, but it was COLD and he was kind of floppy. I took his picture and then gave him a helping hand over the side into the rain-dimpled water. He stroked swiftly to the bottom and vanished under a cinder block.

I just bought a brand new heater, so he should have a comfy place to hibernate this winter, along with the two itty bitty greenies and one large, fat leopard that are already there.

Cammo and carrots

No frogs this summer! Normally as soon as the garden pond is up and running half a dozen show up to claim super-select bug guzzling spots and stay til fall. They soon ignore us completely and go about the serious business of slurping up mosquitoes and errant grasshoppers in contented oblivion. Some even accept handouts. In return for cheap entertainment we take the biggest garter snakes down below the bike path when we find them seeking frog leg lunches. (It is amazing how far we have to cart them before they stop coming back. They put homing pigeons to shame.) However, there have been no frogs this year....it has been too dry. Even up in the field potholes herpetiles have been rare as hen's teeth. Alan found one little green frog which he put in the garden pond a few weeks ago, but that is all.

The game of who can spot the hidden frogs (they have great cammo) loses some of its glamor when there is only one teeny-tiny frog (and an import at that). Then it rained most of our week at camp. It rained almost every day since too (putting a hellacious crimp in the hay baling I can tell you). Rainrainrain...thunderthundercrashinglightningstillmorerain. The driveway is a washout, barely passable by my SUV, (which I find I really NEED this year). It is too wet to pick zucchini. Or peas or beans. Too wet to weed. Too wet to mow the grass (which is growing again). It is no longer dry to say the least.


Yesterday Alan and I stopped by the pond for a game of find the frog. We hadn't seen even the little import in days. Simultaneously we spotted one....at least a foot a part! There were two! Then a third one plopped under a lily pad and frog-stroked for the bottom. Normally we get big, fat frogs; these were barely two inches long. (It makes spotting them even more of a challenge.) Wonder if the weather has anything to do with the small size or if it is just coincidence that we only have little ones this year. Doesn't matter. The pond, which is especially pretty this summer, is once again a fun place to visit.

We grew carrots in half a fifteen gallon barrel this summer. Our soil is so dense that normally you couldn't pull a halfway decent carrot without breaking it, (if you could even grow it in the first place), but a barrel makes it easy. (We grow lettuce, tomatoes and squash in them too.) Half a fifteen gallon barrel is the perfect depth. A mix of sand and compost equals perfect earth. The stuff we wash the pipeline with comes in such barrels and we only get three bucks if we redeem them so the price is right. They are easy to wash and just the right size for a wimpy old lady like me to drag around. Incidentally I have about six more out there in which the guys need to bore drainage holes pretty soon if I am going to have time to grow more carrots before winter.


I pulled this one for salad the other night and was astonished by the color though. Somehow I forgot all about planting Rainbow Carrot mix this year. Yellow is nice, now I can't wait for a purple one.

Summer memo

This is a picture of a water lily blooming on the garden pond. Thought those of you who are also shivering here in the far, far north might enjoy the reminder of better (and warmer) days.

Another hazy morning

This picture of the water garden was taken a few weeks ago, but it still looks much the same. Hoping for some sunshine later for Sundae on the Farm.