I harvested 9 Brook trout last night. Cleaned and soaked them in salt water over night.
Pulled the cover off the smoker and fired it up at 7:30 AM
I hope it warms up properly.

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I don't suppose any one likes to kill their fish. I find it quite traumatic and need to chill out for a good while after dealing with imposed death. Why does it take so long for fish to stop flipping around? I had to clean the blood spots off the window above the sink. Yeah not pleasant for them either, I'm guessing. I have a hard time holding onto them to wack them in the head, so I have been sticking the cleaning knife in their brains to kill them, still they flap and flop. I don't know, hitting the brain works for zombies, right? Perhaps their brain isn't where I think it is, I mean the fish.

This soaking in salt water preserves the beautiful color and texture of these magnificent creatures.
Also the salt cuts down on the slime coat which makes handling the fish a lot easier.
I still do't know how many are left in the fish tank. I'll clean the algae off the viewing window and have a look and count them perhaps today. That water is pretty darn cold though and I am not looking forward to putting my hand in the tank especially with hungry full grown trout dashing about. :support:
Yeah, I may put that off, now that I think about it, lol!
Brian

Try cutting the spinal cord at the same place where you remove the head, they may shiver a bit but there won't be any flopping around.
Are Brook Trout the only kind of trout that you can get?  It has been my experience that Rainbow Trout grow faster and have a lower feed conversion ratio than Brookies.

Oh my goodness.
Nell and I ate one of the little ones right away. Yummy
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The smoker worked better than ever in the snow. I don't know what that's about, don't care really.
Successful 9 trout harvest. More to follow.
Brian
The Brook trout are from a place I'm familiar with. They also have Cut-bows I think. He wanted us to try that hybrid. Maybe this next time we'll go for those.

Good morning
I guess it's been a few weeks since I updated you all on our aquaponics system, as a couple things have happened here. Both my wife Nell and I have had surgeries, her's much more serious than mine, so I've been her care giver full time.
 The aquaponics system is in it's forth year of service producing trout and vegetables year round with little service needed to keep it running. The last four years of my life I've been ill with what was thought to be an autoimmune disease. Along with this debilitating physical symptoms of random swelling of joints came a emotional roller-coaster of horrors. Sometimes I couldn't walk, other times I was fine, with the latter condition usually taking place while I was at the doctor's office, grr. The good news is this is the longest I'm gone without a major joint swelling, so it appears the holistic healer knows what is happening to me better than twenty western medicine specialists.

During 2018 I tried to accommodate the ridiculous quantities of trout I added  to this system by building a new cone bottomed radial flow filter and dual air-lift pump system to handle the gargantuan quantities of fish waste. This was my first catastrophic plumbing fail in the life of our aquaponics system.
We have been trying to reduce the amount of trout in the system to get it back to normal. We started with 100 Brook trout 18 month old fingerlings about this time in 2017. All was good with our filtration until they grew to adult size fish, than they overwhelmed the system. We've been harvesting fish since early Summer 2018.

I believed we got it down to 50 fish by the end of Summer, but it is difficult to tell in this 2600 gallon natural shape fish tank.
Since I last posted we harvested another nine one pound trout and ran out of fish food again, doh!
Yesterday I harvested another five trout.

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We smoked these and ate two for dinner last night.

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Two days ago I noticed something different happening in the aquaponics system; the feed to the RFF (first sediment settling filter) was bubbling instead of flowing dirty  water off the bottom of the fish tank. I wasn't sure what would cause this as I hadn't seen this happening before. I thought about overnight and decided I would figure it out yesterday. I pulled the dual SLO (solids lift outflow) system and see if it was plugged up causing bubbles  from the air-lift pump to go into the RFF. It was dirty, but I don't know about plugged. I cleaned it with a hose and put it back in the water. All seems well now so I guess that was the issue. It still seems a bit weird to me.
Speaking of weird, as I mentioned we ran out of fish food and I already bout five pounds off Ebay for what a fifty pound bag would cost, grr. Fish food goes stale and it wouldn't be good by the time the next round of fish grow out, so I didn't want a full size bag right now.
I figure there were still at least five fish in there. Left with no recourse other than starving the fish I looked at the ingredients of our grain free cat food. I know, please don't hate on me. It turns out the trout loved it, but weird right?
Cat food for fish, then feed the fish to cats???
Alrighty then!
So I went in this morning to check on the filter which has been having way more floating fish waste in it... because cat food floats?? Anywho, there was trout number six I guess, dead on the floor all the way around the fish tank by the filters. How the heck did it get over there? I've never seen any of our trout manage to jump up and over the sides of their pond. It must have jumped out of the bucket as I  was netting fish yesterday. I can't believe I missed it flopping around, whoops.
Ohcrap I just got very lucky.
While adding some photos and a video I locked up this Linux PC, lo and behold this story was still here. Yowsa!

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I don't know why the video locked up my computer, but I'll take that as a sign and not post it. What I saw while making that video is at least another five adult Brook trout that need harvesting before I can clean the fish tank from having 100 trout in there.

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This is the bed under the fancy LED aquarium grow light. I'm not seeing a lot of growth, but it looks like the red stemmed plant which may be beets is doing a little better.

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The egg plants appear to be getting too cold near the big picture window, but the varied pepper plants are still producing flowers and fruit.

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The kale in the DWC are pale and probably need so foliar nutrients sprayed on, so I'll get after that ASAP.
All in all I'm quite happy with the how the aquaponics greenhouse is doing while the temperatures outside have slid down to zero.
Best wishes,
Brian