The frop bog and pond - now it's spring 2023!

I guess Jerimiah is not a good friend of yours! ; )

He was hard to understand.

He did make some mighty fine wine.

He had mighty fine wine, he did not make wine. :)

Hmmmm…. Had some so I guess he always shared!

Spring 2023!

It’s finally warm enough that the ice has melted, and we were able to take the netting off the pond. I lost some fish to racoons last fall when I was sick, but I’d hoped it was just 1. Sadly I lost nearly every new fish except 3 to the racoons.

As soon as have the filtration system setup, and it’s warmer I’m going to get some new ones as I’m kinda crushed those beautiful guys are gone. To that end I’m going to get some electrical fencing to try and keep the racoons away from the pond. I’m looking at something like this on a timer (night only), but if any of you have suggestions I’d be open to them. I’m concerned this will not be enough voltage to ultimately dissuade them from making a dinner out of my precious fishies.

Behold the frop bog!


You may notice that there are a lot of leaves left over from last fall around the yard, and those tend to blow into the water, which isn’t great for the fish and is a pain to clean up. So Jeff and I spent some quality time out there this afternoon, raking things up (and digging out one particularly stubborn bush). One full economy-size yard debris container later…

Not a huge difference, but enough that there will be less water-skimming maintenance necessary. At least until next fall.

No frogs out yet, but the koi are swimming around.



Jeff even pointed out a few young fish in the upper stream portion (not pictured). He didn’t put them there, some eggs must have been transferred up from the big pond via other animals or possibly through the water pump.

where are the auto-gun turrets for the raccoons?

Nice. Never got the big picture before.

Thank you @ineffablebob! You did almost all the work, the little bit I did wiped me out so bad I have an inadvertent reminder of why I need new lungs so dearly. It’s pretty cool how amenable to people the fish are. When we first went out the fish were all deep and mostly hidden, but by the time we got done they were all at the surface checking us out. I notice things like that and it makes me really happy to see :)

We’ll have to do a before and after. Because right now it looks abysmal out there and very dead (plants, the water etc). The difference 30 days from now will be remarkable. Hopefully I’ll have all the tubes and everything gone as the real pump/UV/filtration system will replace the temp winter setup running right now.

Spring is such an amazing time watching everything come back to life.

If you pro-rate the work done by percentage of available lung function, you outworked me by a mile!

We have a much smaller pond, but like you we got wiped out of fish by either racoons (probably) or maybe fisher birds. The last 3 years we have had success with

  1. Physical barrier, first we used a net then we found a light rattan cover that we can place over the pond
  2. Anti-varmint (water) cannon: while the physical barrier is good in the winter, we remove it spring-fall and rely on the turret :).

I lost a lot of fish to racoons last year, so this year I’m taking the nuclear option and going electric! (fencing) I’m posting my order in case anyone has some suggestions or changes they think I should make. I wish I didn’t have to spend so much, but even with live trapping and relocating 12 racoons last year, we still lost 7 fish over the summer and fall. I don’t have the heart to see more of my Koi die again this year, and I’m not sure I even have the strength to live trap racoons again as racoon + trap is so incredibly heavy, so this seemed like the best option.

I know nothing about such fencing but if you want some help installing it, let me know! What’s a few shocks in the pursuit of koi safety?

That would be wonderful!

Sir, you are a class act.

Be sure to have the video taping when he grabs the fence.

image

Long live the frops 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸

Wumpus you’re back?