Part Two
| The high point of the year was when the fish started to arrive. Lorraine went to town to do the regular Saturday morning running and I headed to the rock pile. When she arrived back home, she had six Goldfish from the pet store at the mall, the fish were about 2 to 3 inches long. In went the bag of fish and we waited for the water temperature in the pond and bag to adjust to each other, then the fish were out of the bag and in their new home. It was great but six fish three inches long in a 45 x 35 foot pond are pretty hard to see, so back to the store and six more Goldfish found a new home that day. Our next fishing trip was brought on by the comments of a friend who said that the Colchester Co-op had some much larger fish in the garden center. So Lorraine was off and running after some encouragement from me. The new comers were a much larger Goldfish about 6 to 8 inches, so now you didn't have to strain to see them. |
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Plants were next on the list so off we went to a near by water hole to see what we
could find, and there were lots around. We packed them up and we head home
to start planting. After a real good wash---and trying to figure out how to put them
in containers---into the pond they went. It's looking better all the time. Fall started and work on the pond stopped. Everything was working well and leaf removal was the order of the day. |
| With the ice melting and winter over the pond was starting to come back to life. This year we were planning to get the water fall up and going so it was back to gathering more rocks and trying to come up with a design we both could live with. Well the design idea didn't work so I just built the darn thing as I went, with Lorraine's advice and encouragement all along the way and after a month or so we had a great looking waterfall. |
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The fish came through the winter with no problems and everyone was accounted for in the spring. They seemed like happy campers all swimming and eating to their hearts content. A month or so later I noticed that the fish count was getting lower in fact, three were missing so in I went and started to look around and found what I didn't want to find. We had wrapped our new Oxygenation Plants in a nylon mesh to keep them in place while they grew roots and thought no more about it but the fish thought about it and decided to check it out. Well the three lost fish got caught in the mesh and (you know the rest) so the mesh was removed and that ended that problem.
One day in the spring when the sun was shinning bright, the birds were singing and the beer tasted good, I saw what looked like a pin fish. The darn thing was so small you almost needed a magnifying glass to see it. Anyway the thought that life was breeding in our pond was great. That day I counted about ten pin fish and kept a eye on them for the next couple of weeks but to my surprise as time went on the count went from 10 to 50 to 200 to 500 and in the end there must have been about 1000 of the little guys.
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| As the summer went on the pin fish started to grow up to be fry and were black in color which didn't seem right to me. The thought that maybe they weren't Goldfish after all but something we brought home from a nearby water hole wasn't a happy one. The last thing I wanted was to have some Perch or other predator fish eating our Goldfish. I talked to people and later found out that Goldfish start black and can take up to two years to change to gold. Sure enough by mid- summer some of the fish had started to turn gold. |
| Lorraine and I went shopping for plants one day to Lowland Gardens in Great Village and saw some beautiful Koi there and I said to myself "I want some Koi" so off to Halifax we go and bought two gold and black Koi and showed them their new home. What great fish. They eat right out of my hand now and are neat to watch. |
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