What are Yabbabs I here you ask ok this is a recipe I developed when I lived in Bendigo the first thing you need is some pretty good size Yabbies we are only using the tail, so after you humanly dispatch the yabbies remove the tail and the elementary tract that’s for you who don’t know is the black line extending down the tail, clean and wash in salty water and place on a skewer long enough to keep your hands out of the oil make some beer batter and dunk your tails into the batter and coat well and then into the oil until cooked it pays to try one before you serve them up and there you have Yabbabs.For those of you that like a feed of Yabbies from time to time and you have access to a dam it pays to feed your Yabbies, you will have more Yabbies and they will be bigger, above I am placing Lucerne billets around the dam the young Yabbies will feed on this and hopefully grow nice and fat to feed my fish and me, we only have four weeks to spring and the Yabbies will be mating soon so if you intend to do this now is the time, by the way most herbage is good food for Yabbies vegetables scraps as well, just don’t put to much in you may mess up the dam for other users.

I make and sell breeding boxes for native fish these are the same design that I used when I successfully bred my blackfish you can see they have some holes at one end this is to allow some water flow while the closed end offers the fish and eggs some protection from predators, the handle allows for depth adjustment and can be made longer if required.

The object leaning against the shed door is a bat box designed for our local insect eating bats, there are five or six different  bats in western Victoria all are very small without their wings they would be smaller than a mouse.

the bat box is $14 the fish boxes are $12 plus delivery.

I will advise on installation to each individual buyer as different fish require different placement. Money from the sales will go towards the fish breeding facility.

If you are interested please phone 0407843998 or leave your details in comments thank you.

Native plants going in around the ponds these will attract insects and birds and in turn feed the fish. We purchased the plants from Pearson’s nursery at Allansford near Warrnambool the young lady that served us was very helpful and clearly new her plants we will do more with them in the future.

We had a early sneak peek at spring today and it was perfect for planting , up until now the ground has been far to wet.

It is worth remembering that animals do much better if they feel safe and comfortable they will breed a lot easier and be much better at the handling stages. This applies to all animals not just fish.

You can also see the solar lights also for attracting insects to the waters edge for the fish to feed on, the grass has picked up its been slow because of the cold and wet overcast days, hopefully that’s behind us now we are moving into the windy part of the year, wind is our friend because it aerates the ponds and dams.

 

It seems I spelt Heytesbury wrong in a couple of post I am sorry it will not happen again.

Thanks for correcting me in comments if I make anymore blunders please let me know. Leo is sorry too.

Tank no 5 is the ugly duckling of my tanks it has fantastic habitat its aerated in under trees produces good yabbies but the blackfish struggle I am going to re assign this tank for another purpose probably bait and plants to feed and seed the other four tanks and four ponds.

The pots contain Nardoo which is a native water weed famous for starving Burke and Wills to death, but it attracts insects and frogs which we already  have in abundance.

I know that a lot of you fishers are aware of the great black bream fishing in the Curdies river around boggy creek and Peterborough however once you get away from the salt influence there is not much to fish for the odd eel redfin and even trout, it is my plan to change that I fully intend to have blackfish in place as soon as fisheries gives me the go ahead, I only live a mile from the river so as soon as I get fisheries here to inspect my setup and see the fish are healthy it could happen this breeding season and you can expect to be able to catch legal fish in this place in a few short years. I also must say that if you are coming down this way to fish or sightsee  you should take a drive through the Hatesbury settlement it features some of the prettiest land scapes in AUST not to mention the great dairy farming ,producing milk that goes to making  cheese yogurt and all manner of thins for AUST and for  export to the rest of the world.    The Curdies  valley looking southwest with a rain shower coming up the valley.

This is a photo of a corrugated tin boat, I took this photo in Perth at a maritime museum and it reminded me of when I was a boy growing up at Cooriemungle  where we had a barb wire canoe it  was  a little  different than this one it was tied together with barbed wire, needless to say we learnt to bale and swim at the same time, I know that the young today might think they are a myth but I kid you not we had one.

I was raised at Cooriemungle In the heart of the Hatesbury shire this small creek runs past the farm I grew up on, when the Hatesbury shire was first cleared to make way for farm land some of these small creeks were damaged now we can,t give back the farm land the world needs the food but we can undo some of the damage that was done to the small creeks that run through this area.

The Cooriemungle creeks ( there arms two arms of this creek ) need some money spent on them to deepen and replace habitat that was removed, remove willows trees where they exist and so on we all know the problems and even the answers we just need the motivation and some funding to allow these waterways to once again be great habitat for river Blackfish.

So again I ask the question why are there no river Blackfish in the Cooriemungle creek.

Its not like we can,t breed them.

I use this for  quarantine, when you bring fresh fish or live food onto the farm its a good idea to have somewhere that you can put them for a while to see if they are sound and don’t carry any disease , with blackfish it is pretty obvious  if things aren’t right however if I bring fresh yabbies onto the farm from a new source I will place them in here, its a good place if you have sick fish to isolate it from the others make sure you disinfect after the fish is gone, to disinfect I use sun light but if you are in a hurry wash with salt and rinse well and let stand in the sun for as long as possible. you can get old vats from farmers who have updated to bigger ones if you can find one, it is polite to offer some money even if they don’t ask remember to buy a dedicated trough would cost several hundred dollars.

Breeding boxes if you wish to breed blackfish you will need somewhere for the female to lay her eggs this should be some sort of hollow structure 90 mil plastic tubes do fine or hollow longs that you can get from suppliers or find yourself , I made mine out of 10 mil ply  simply nailed together no glue as you can see in the photos they are not very big about 600 long and about 90×90 inside I kept them small to suit the fish I had at the time if you have larger fish you should increase the size of the hollow. I used just normal ply not form ply in order to not introduce a foreign substance to the water normal ply is stuck together with latex adhesive which occurs naturally in nature. I should add that the box above is five years old and has been exposed to all kinds of weather.

When you place the boxes in the water take time to consider the depth, it has been my experience that  as the water table warms they tend to favour deeper boxes at the start  in the early spring shallower boxes so the best policy is to have boxes at varying depths not to deep, you can see the top of my first box in the water and my deepest would be no more than 1.3 metres.