If you like mowing lawn in your spare time you should plant a lawn in your front or back yard. If on the other hand you like to fish you should plant fish in your yard instead. Clanachan was in mothballs for 20 years while I was gallivanting around the globe contributing to solutions to all manner of contaminated surface water situations. When we decided to blow the dust off the farm Teresa asked if we could have a small water feature in the yard. Small is a relative term so about 2,000,000+ liters later we have a pond in the South facing front yard that reflects about half again more solar gain into our front windows in the winter than normal. I can give you 10 very good reasons why a person who has even a small piece of land should have a small surface waterbody on it. Suffice to say, the way things are going in this day and age, it is a wise person who has domain over his own supply of treatable, relatively clean, raw water. Fish is just one reason – for recreation, rearing, for barter, sale or consumption, capable of being preserved without much use of power with sun, salt or smoke. These Rainbow are not my first choice of fish species to raise but they are sexually viable and given even the most basic of environments to nest in, the females will lay their eggs and at least prevent their own demise from being eggbound with necrotic eggs. They do have a good rate of growth though and please note that neither of these fish in these pictures are being held at arm’s length to make them look bigger.                                                      

posted on Jun 19, 2012