Mini update on goings on this week...
Our brood females are starting to out grow their pond and with the increase in brood stock that we've invested in over the years, the time has finally come to build them a new pond.
This has been happening over the last few weeks and we finally reached the point of a test fill.
The tank itself is 28k litres, and with filtration and so on, the system will be around 30k litres.
We've sited the tank in our middle polytunnel which completes the process of dedicating one polytunnel to brood stock; with some breeding and egg rearing facilities. And also one bank of growing on tanks. Keeping all those things close together will help streamline our operations.
We've built the tank our of sleepers - and I'm not sure how many ponds this size have been built above ground in sleepers - certainly, I've not heard of one. When we found the 4.8m length of sleeper, I just had to give it a go!. The key aspect was finding the longer 4.8m sleeper (rather than the standard 2.4m ones). And then it's built in a similar manner to our growing on tanks.
Other news.., Tonight we are running more spawnings and we are almost at the end of that process for this year, with perhaps just one more spawning night planned for around a week's time.
Also.. fry ponds 2 and 5 are almost ready for harvest and I expect we'll be pulling the fry out towards the end of this week.
And with fry pond 6.. it's refill time, and we'll try and get one more use out of it.