Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Simmo... I think they're actually a good bug.... Mealybug Ladybird - Cryptolaemus montrouzieri

They lay there eggs into the egg clumps of the mealy bug.... hatch (real small) and hang around eating the mealy bug eggs... or even the mealy bug itself...

Been known to eat other "scaley" insects as well .... saved the Californian Orange industry years ago ....

http://www.brisbaneinsects.com/brisbane ... dybird.htm

Not sure Amacafish? I just read your mind though, while I was outside a minute ago I picked that leaf off the basil plant and put it in the fish tank. Better to be safe than sorry.

As for eating them, I was thinking of doing this:

• 2 cloves crushed garlic

• 2 tspn grated or finely slivered and chopped fresh ginger root

• 1 tblspn butter

• 1 cup fish stock (Campbell’s cardboard cartons)

• ½ cup Stones ginger wine or white wine

• ¼ cup sweet sherry and ¼ cup port or use just sherry

• 1 cup cream

• 1 tblspn unsalted butter

• Salt or soy sauce to taste

• 1-2 tblspn balsamic or flavoured berry vinegar

Method:

In a frying pan gently fry garlic and ginger in butter for a minute to soften. Add stock wine and sherry and simmer for 2-3 minutes.

Stun the yabbies by placing in the freezer for about 30 minutes. Add to pot in one layer - there has to be enough liquid to kill the stunned yabbies quickly. Turn over if necessary. Remove when they turn red. Cook the rest of the yabbies. Remove yabbies from the pan while you make the sauce.

Add cream to the cooking juices and boil rapidly for about 5 minutes or until reduced by half. Cut butter into small cubes and whisk into the sauce. Check flavour, adding salt and pepper if necessary.

Finally cut the sauce with a splash of balsamic or other fruit flavoured or white wine vinegar.

Return yabbies to the sauce and heat through.

Serve with boiled rice to soak up the creamy sauce.



Sorry I don't have the source for this recipe, I have a word doc with a heap of recipes that I have gotten from the net at one time or another...

Nice, it's nearly lunch time here and my stomach is waking up just at reading the recipe.
Have a nice meal

What is the size of the yabbies you caught?

Did you see the post of ROZ?
Do you have scaley parasites on the plants?

Rupe, I'm still not sure, but its too late for these ones anyway. I was in the middle of replying to Amacafish and only saw your message just now.

The ones that were clumped on the squash leaf have now dispersed and are roaming about the growbed...

Nope, no scaly parasites at all, I know what mealybugs look like and haven't seen any on the plants at all...

Last post before I start making dinner, while netting the yabbies I pulled out one poor male who has just one leg left...

No claws, no antennae (besides a short stump) and just the one leg left on the right side. He's also covered in epistylis.

I felt sorry for "Limpy" and put him into my indoor tropical aquarium, he's definitely no danger to the guppies and tetras in there, and they're too small to do him any harm, so hopefully he will live long enough to moult and grow some appendages back. Might be an interesting experiment.

that will be good and will show you their real behaviour.
Have you thought of doing lots of small net cages with one yabbie in each like they do for lobster in canada. Or pipes with mesh on each side stacked one on another with the water flowing from end to end.
They can keep them for ages in recirc systems and even have them growing without any problem, musn't be the best life for the animals though.
Depends on which side you look at it, i suppose that Limpy would have liked having been in cage at the time of attack

Very impressed with the recipe simmo, usually I just boil them for 3min or until they float to surface, shell them and it's all gung-ho from there.
Can't wait to catch some more and give this a go.

The topic of farming crays in isolated chambers (of whatever sort) has been discussed on this forum and to be truthful I'm not a fan.

My pop retired in the early 90's and one of his retirement projects (besides Ostrich farming and an olive plantation) was to set up a business farming Marron in this way. He used 1.25 litre plastic soft drink bottles joined together end to end with one marron per bottle, but didn't even break even before he called it quits and moved onto the next hair-brained scheme. There was a small hole drilled in to the top of the bottle to allow a pellet of food to be dropped into each bottle and it was essentially a large recirculating system with a gravel biofilter. The poor things didn't even have room to turn around in the bottle.

I want to increase the number of hides on the bottom of my yabby IBC so i'm going to build a number of pyramids made of PVC tubing of various sizes. Start with a few lengths of 90mm storm water on the bottom level laid side by side, next level up will be 50mm and so on... I'm going to get busy building them this week so i'll upload pics when done.

It was yummo! sorry no pics of the dinner - it disappeared to quick, but heres a pic of the main ingredient.



They looked bigger underwater , two males and two females, the top two were the guys. They had a few temno on them (but not that many) so I gave them a quick salt bath before they went into the ice slurry. The smallest (no claws) weighed just over 40g, the largest (top of screen) weighed 70g.

I put a scallops that we had in the freezer in too just to bulk it out enough to feed two people, and omitted the cream and instead added more white wine and reduced the liquid down more.

Very tasty!

Been very busy over the past couple of weeks due to a couple of reasons - Firstly, I've started job hunting and landed myself a new job within the space of a week (seems there's quite a demand for us IT geeks at the current time ), and we have a new addition to the household, Bella...

Mate those look like Koonacs, notice the one bump in the claw of the top one.

On the AP side of things, nothing major to report really... I'm seeing some phenomenal growth in my squash, cucumbers and zucchini. We've harvested about 6 good size cucumbers, and countless zucchini and squash, including a couple of absolute monsters, pictured below...



You can see a few "normal" sized green squash in the pic below for comparison. The big one weighed in at 600g!



Also, remember Limpy, the one legged yabby?

He's been living in my indoor tropical tank for a couple of weeks now and he's moulted He now has a bunch of (very small) new limbs and chelipeds so he can at least now drag himself around slowly and feed easier. He only moulted yesterday so I'm not game to pick him up for a photo because his new shell will still be very soft, but I will in a week or so just so you can all see the newly formed limbs after the first moult.

They might look like them, but they're not gnash... I'd love to get some Koonacs though, but i think they are hard to come by in the wild, and not available at all for aquaculture as far as i know...

They are a lot bluer than the pic makes out and the chelipeds in particular are the giveaway.

http://www.fish.wa.gov.au/docs/pub/IdCr ... 4.php?0304

Wow!