Life's good, no life's great at Rock HQ, even as we approach a very sad anniversary for us, life just gets better. Now they do say give a busy man a job, or maybe its a case of the devil finding work for idle hands, or maybe even I have undiagnosed attention deficit disorder and cannot focus long enough on one project, but whatever, theres a new scheme afoot here in paradise. And it makes the most of what we have got here, hill and water.
I do have an affliction that I seldom mention to people. I mean its not the thing you can crowbar into conversations, and as an opening gambit it tends to make people think you are weird, so my fascination with fish is kept to myself. Now and then I am found at the fishmongers as open mouthed as the catch of the day staring at the scaly finned beauties. Fishing you can keep, holds no interest for me, unless its with explosives and then the returns seem a lot better for the time expended, but fish, well I can watch them for hours. Live or dead. The bonus is that they taste good too. So for a while now there has been a small acorn of an idea waiting to find the fertile soil of inspiration and a few spare shoots of money tree to fund.
As anyone reading these pages regularly will know, we live on a bonsai mountain which gives us lots of gravity, and living in a higher than average area for rainfall we have an abundance of water. Some three springs, one stream, two wells, a third waiting to be found,adorn our property. By some Heath Robinson reverse engineering, lots of plastic pipe, a few well placed bricks and taps we have managed to pipe water to all points of the smallholding, and by careful tap turning, opening and closing of hatches, re routing of a crucial piece of pipe, we can even get the flow to go uphill to the boys when they are grazing by the snowline.
Finally the acorn found fertile ground and the new idea formed into a plan which has now been researched as well as any other plan here and an embryonic fish farm is taking shape. After the complete disrespect shown to the 300 hundred gallon tank pond by the ducks it suddenly occurred that that same unloved duck pond would make an ideal receptacle for fish. Brown trout. They need running water and oxygen and a tasty vegetarian diet,space to grow, as a 1000 trout three inches long will only fill carrier bag, but same 1000 weighing a couple of pounds will need the space of a small arctic lorry to cavort around and do fishy things, like school. So a series of 300 gallon tanks on our hill, with our water running through our plastic pipes, the overflow running into the tank below, thus oxygenating it, and then the final overflow into the irrigation system in the garden. Simple. Having found a fish hatchery to supply us and the exciting prospect of another licence, number, regulating body to join its all systems go. The pipework will be laid this weekend, the fact that one of the 300 gallon tanks is currently buried and in totally the wrong place is a minor snag, as it the cost of further tanks, but we have three, and that's a magic number so what could possibly go wrong! Watch and see!
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