Please persevere with me on this.
Read a tatty free magazine that the wife brought home from the US this morning, wife had torn out a couple of pages she thought would interest me.
It was about TV documentary shows of the type seen on BBC2 BBC4, Ch 4, Discovery, Nat Geo and they were talking to assorted US / UK /AUSSIE film makers etc
The snippet the wife had picked up on was one of the crews had been involved with a program that I guess was either home improvement or garden landscaping ( yup boring I know but keep going)
I quote them
“ We are doing more and more pond installations for home steaders and preppers who want to grow Koi Carp both for ornamental use and as a food source”.
Something for us to revisit again? Keeping fast growing, easy to look after, cheap to feed fish as a back up food source? In the colder bits like the UK and Northern US areas Koi appear to be the default choice, in warmer climes like the southern US Tilapia appear to be suitable.
I have visited Norway on various occasions (actually my favourite country), and on a visit to Voss I discovered a rather nice lake up in the lower mountains. Someone had apparently loosed a load of goldfish into it at one time, because they had gone forth and multiplied. The locals used to go up there, catch them and have barbecues. Apparently it was quite the done thing for the young'uns, and judging by the size of the fishbones they were a decent size. They were definitely goldfish - aren't they carp?
Mary in a very similar vein at the old Admiralty parts depot in Eaglesliffe way back in the late fifties / early sixties someone tossed some fairground goldfish into the multiple fire water reservoirs dotted around the site and promptly forgot about them. in the late eighties they discovered a thriving population of giant goldfish weighing up to 11 pounds each.
Couple of useful points , a happy healthy gold fish / carp can live up to fifty years and in the right conditions can exceed 40 pounds in weight.
Goldfish/Carp / Koi only grow the suit the size of the container they are kept in, so the bigger the pond the bigger the fish. I have seen 3 and 4 pound goldfish and carp grown in partially buried ( for insulation) pairs of IBCs, one used as habitat the other used as filter and oxygen transfer.
NR, That is what I'm looking at doing with the IBCs. Aquaphonics with some sort of cold fish.
plenty of fishing lakes in North Devon !!!
Fishponds Nr Luppit in Devon is a great SW RV location and good fishing.
Skean Dhude Offline
RE: Food Fish for Preppers
NR, That is what I'm looking at doing with the IBCs. Aquaphonics with some sort of cold fish.
So if you do not want expensive to buy and run oxygenating kit and high quality water filters forget about Trout, Salmon, Char etc and stick with Cyprinids ( Carp, Goldfish, Mirror, Common and Koi) they don't require the very high levels of oxygen and pure water quality the Salmondae need. Carp actually like cloudy, greenish water with lots of vegetation, they prefer slower water movement as well so your not running pumps to give a fast flow that is needed for trout etc. You can keep carp in sterile pond type breeding tanks and feed em on pellets ( NOT TROUT PELLETS they damage carps guts and kill em early) or you can keep them even happier in ornamental ponds with varying depths, plenty of plants ( and insect life) and a slower but still required bio filter ( or go the read bed route if you have space)
(6 November 2014, 11:08)NorthernRaider Wrote: [ -> ]Fishponds Nr Luppit in Devon is a great SW RV location and good fishing.
I don't have to go that far NR !! I've got them within 4 miles of home.
What many fishys don't like INCLUDING hardy species like carp is ICE and Shallow water ESPECIALLY together, a bloody good rule of thumb is your outdoor pond needs to be 4 ft deep minimum and if its an above ground set up rather than buried it needs to be highly INSULATED to the sides ( six inches is the norm) Most fish can survive a winter providing the pond has ice free deep points ( 4ft) to shelter in and a hole is kept open in any ice that forms on the surface to allow air transfer. If you see your fish developing a sort of semi white slimy coating on their skins in winter it means they are suffering. Buried ponds are best because the ground both insulates the pond and ground heat stops the water from going under 50 degrees, if above ground the pond must be well insulated. Some breeders using linked IBCs etc or 100 gallon water tanks plonk a cheap greenhouse or polly tunnel over the pond in winter, Anything that allows sunlight through but keeps frost and ice at bay is good.