Look at All The Goldfish

With the recent freeze, most plants have been removed from the ponds because they can't survive the cold. This has provided a much better view of the goldfish and there are a bunch of goldfish. The first picture is of the large pond where you see goldfish of many colors and sizes swimming near the surface. The second picture shows the fish in the foster care pond. My friend has finally moved to her new house and plans to prepare her pond in the next week. Soon after we'll arrange the transfer of the 15 or so fish in the foster care pond to her new pond.

Caught the Fish Sleeping

I got a good picture of some of the young goldfish tonight. Since the water is getting so cold and nightfall is so early, the fish go to sleep where ever they stop. This picture shows goldfish 2 to 4 inches in length in the shallow water. These fish were born in the late spring this year. It was really nice to catch the black goldfish suspended over the orange brick so he stood out and to see the goldfish with the white accent. We have a number of black goldfish but they are hard to see as they blend into the pond liner. The protective net add some "interest" to the photo.

Giant Elephant Ear Bulbs

I dug up the Elephant ears yesterday to prepare them for winter. The bulbs have very coarse roots spidering in all directions. A good cleaning reveals baby bulbs hanging off their sides. these babies can be dried and planted next year. The bulbs can triple in size in a growing season. Here are two pictures of the bulbs, one after the initial cleaning and the other shows them spread on the newspaper for drying. To get an idea of the size of the biggest bulbs, I have set them next to a 2 liter soda bottle. You can see all the baby bulbs that came from about 20 plants that I grew this year. After they dry for a couple of weeks, I will pack them in peat moss and replant next spring after the last freeze.

Sad Elephant Ears

You can sure tell when you've had the temperature drop into the 20's. Elephant ears can't take below freezing temperature and it only takes a couple of hours of cold air to make the leaves droop badly. Night before last we had our first full night of cold temperatures and the Elephant ear scene that greeting me in the morning was depressing. The plants had gone from lush to wasted in just a few hours. This morning they have lost all of their strength so the leaves are just laying on the ground. Today's chore is to dig up all the Elephant ear bulbs, clean them, dry them and store them in peat moss in the garage for the winter. If they are allowed to freeze they will die.

Dinner by Candle Light

This time of year is such a pain. With rolling back the clocks, it is dark when I get home from work. To complicate the problem, we are having some pretty warm weather. The warmer weather warms the pond water and the fish become more active and hungry. I've started turning on the area lights around the pond for a couple of hours each night so the fish and enjoy their dinner. They could probably eat in the dark but I couldn't see that and I would miss seeing them. Here is a not so good picture of one of the lights which provides good down lighting on the pond for the fish. The light looks a lot better in person.

Last weekend I took down and cleaned the filter I was using for the foster care fish but since the new pond still isn't ready, I had to replace it with another filter. I bought a neat little filter that looks like a shoebox sized green box to replace the homemade filter that my friend loaned me to care for her fish. Below are two pictures, one of the foster care pond sporting it's new filter and the the now cleaned filter that was replaced showing all of it's components.

Close Encounters With Giant Bullfrog

Yesterday was filter cleaning day for the large pond and I decided to also clean the waterfall to get ready for winter. I shut down the waterfall pump and removed the large Sweetflag that was in the waterfall pool. The waterfall pool is a 20 gallon reservoir and it was very murky. After removing the Sweetflag, I reached in to remove some rocks on the bottom and was shocked by something very large that squirmed around. After my shock subsided, I scooped out the water until a couple of inches were left and there was the largest Bullfrog I've ever seen up close. I captured him and put him in a bucket while I finished the cleaning. In this picture, you see the bullfrog almost covered the bottom of the bucket which is 8 1/2 inches across. After I finished the cleaning, he was returned but I worry he'll be unhappy with the newly clean environment.