A Look At Our Backyard

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My husband and I live on 2-1/2 acres of land. Over the years we have transformed our property into my dream. My husband built me a 50′ long arbor that I trained pink and purple wisteria to totally encase the top. It was and still is a labor of love and a lot of maintaining. The pictures below are from this past spring. I planted pink, purple, pink and so on at each wood post. The pictures are both ends of my arbor. It is so tall you can walk through it. I just love it!

These are my beautiful volunteer sunflowers that grew in my flower bed thanks to the birds that we feed. According to Google, these are not the sunflowers that people eat the seeds from.

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I will leave them here until the seeds show themselves and see if the birds will eat them from the flower. The best part about these flowers is that they are right outside my bedroom window. They are the first thing I see when I open up my shade in the morning.

We also have two small ponds filled with goldfish. When we put them in we went to the pet store and bought 100 feeder fish for $10.00. They were very small and I put 50 fish in each pond. Well actually it ended up being almost 65 fish for each pond. When the store clerk caught the fish he just scooped them out assuming it was 100 fish.

I knew nothing about having a pond so I figured if I killed these fish I would only be out $10.00. We’ll it turned out I didn’t kill them no matter what I did wrong. In fact, they even laid eggs and they hatched. Some of the babies survived the others were eaten. Just what I needed….more fish!

I bought two kids plastic pools and put them in our basement. When October came, I caught all the fish and put them in the pools because I didn’t want the fish to freeze over the winter. I had to change the water in these pools every 4 days using a bucket and pouring the water into my sump pump crock. We have a sink with running water so I filled them with a hose. This was a lot of work! The next year I hooked up two of our large fish aquariums that had fish filters. Well with that many fish I still was changing the water every week or so…..the fish were still pretty small.

In the spring I went to clean out the ponds before putting the fish back outside and I found two living goldfish that I had missed in the fall! So for two years I was killing myself keeping these goldfish in our basement and didn’t have to.

The next fall I purchased two air pumps with large air stones and left the fish out for the winter. The air kept the water from freezing completely so that they could breathe. I read up on how to winter Koi fish and followed those instructions for my goldfish.

One summer day I woke up to my daughter saying “Mom, there was a blue flamingo at our ponds.” I just laughed because we live in the North where there are no flamingos. Later that day I looked out and there was a blue heron eating my fish from my pond. Soon after, a white egret decided to stop and have dinner too. I have since covered the ponds with deer netting to save my fish. I haven’t seen a blue heron but the egret still visits and jabs his beak through the net killing a fish but then he can’t get the fish out through the net so he leaves me the dead fish.

Today, my feeder goldfish are about 7-8 years old. They are the size of Koi and when I clean the ponds and remove them I can wrap my hands around them. I have 34-36 fish in each pond still!

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My husband does most of our garden. I have one big section that I grow rhubarb, raspberries, asparagus and strawberries in. I also have two good size blueberry bushes. The rest my husband made into raised beds for vegetables.

Over the years we have had 3 apple trees, grapes, peach trees, nectarine tree, sweet and sour cherry trees. We have since cut down most of the trees because we planted them over 20 years ago and they weren’t producing well any more. We haven’t planted any more because we are getting older and we cherish working less in the yard and enjoying it more!

Thank you for letting me share something I love almost as much as cooking!

 

 

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58 Comments »

  3. Loved this post! I also love goldfish, and I have a few large black moors that I keep in an indoor tank. Actually, one of them pulled a Michael Jackson on me and lost all of his black pigmentation by the end of his third year. He’s now a beautiful, sparkling orange that looks a bit out of place amongst the others. 🙂

    Though I have always wanted and outdoor pond, I’m afraid the birds around here would leave me nothing to enjoy…

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    • Hahaha that is so funny! I wonder what caused the change in the pigment? Birds are a definite problem but the deer netting really helped andthen my floating plants covered the entire top of the pond. I don’t see any birds now and I am constantly throwing out plants so the fish have an opening…lol

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  6. It’s all so lovely, especially how you tend/have tended to the fish over the years, with taking them out into the kiddie pool. That’s interesting you mention goldfish, because I get a science e-newsletter and one of the recent blurbs I read said that goldfish can survive without oxygen for up to 5 months. I thought that was amazing. I love it all, especially the purple wisteria. Wish I had that kind of green thumb; you and your husband must spend hours working in the garden and trees everyday, particularly in spring!

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  13. What a beautiful place to be! Now I understand why your food looks so delicious! Who wouldn’t be inspired after immersing themselves in that loveliness 🙂

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  19. What a beautiful yard! The pink and purple wisterias are absolutely gorgeous and I really enjoyed reading about your fish experience; it had me laughing out loud at work. Thanks for sharing!

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  22. Thank you for such a wonderful description of your garden! That wisteria is stunning. I love your pond story. That is something I would do. 🙂

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