YOU CAN CATCH 'EM AT HOME!

Image Gallery

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Reprinted with permission from Mechanix Illustrated, April 1945, copyright © Fawcett Publications Inc.

Once again, we're pleased to roll the clock back as much as 30 years or more in order to reprint two more articles by author Hi Sibley.

Hi, in case you've never heard of his work, was living a MOTHER-type life of do-it-yourself adobe houses, organic gardening, homestead bees, and like that away back at the end of World War II. And not only living it ... but writing about it in a great number of magazines. Unfortunately for us all, more folks back there in the late 40's were interested in big cars, city jobs, and new homes in the suburbs ... than were interested in Hi's subjects.

Now that so many of us are rediscovering Mr. Sibley's way of life, though, we think it's only fair to honor the man who was 30 years ahead of his time by again publishing some of his down-to-earth gems one more once ... this time, on the subject of homestead ponds. "You Can Catch 'Em At Home" originally appeared in the April 1945 Mechanix illustrated (Copyright 1945 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.) and "I Fish In My Back Yard" was first published in the March 1961 issue of Popular Science (Copyright 1961 by Times Mirror Magazines, Inc.). Both articles are reprinted here by permission.

You like to fish? All right, bring your tackle out to my back yard—you'll get your limit of large—or smallmouth black bass, bluegills, and bream before lunch time.

Actually this is being done in thousands of artificial ponds in the southeast section of the country, and if not exactly in back yards, in what were former gardens, pasture, etc. With over six years of experience in this extremely interesting work the Alabama Experiment Station has proved that, under proper conditions, more meat can be produced per acre in the form of fish than in beef cattle—in fact, up to 600 lbs. The secret appears to be in stocking the right kinds of fish in the correct proportions, and then fertilizing, not the soil in the bottom of the pond, but the water itself. The belief among anglers that fish thrive best among the spatterdocks, cattails, and water lilies has been proved wrong; these "water weeds" as the fish-pond owners call them, are undesirable, providing very little food and assimilating too much of the nutrition of the fertilizer applied which should properly feed the algae and microscopical floating plants upon which insects, tadpoles, crawfish, and other small animals subsist and in turn provide food for the bass, bluegills, etc.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print