Today we are going to discuss our crawdads. We keep them in our handmade pond! We will discuss how we got these, the failures we went through, and what we plan on doing with them!
This is our water lettuce. We keep it at the surface of the water. Originally we placed it to help provide shade for the crawdads, but we found that the crawdads absolutely love to eat the lettuce. They’ll crawl along the underside of the leaves and they eat the roots.
This is one of the red crawdads. This is a baby of one of the originals that we had brought in.
So when we originally brought in the crawdads, the red ones, we didn’t realize how many would be coming in the order. And there was so many that they just ended up fighting in this tank because this tank can only hold so many crawdads.
The crawdads are highly territorial and will fight each other and will end up eating each other for food if they do not have enough food and enough space for each other. So unfortunately, a bunch of them died. So then we clean up the pond and then after a couple months after refilling it and just letting the pond sit, we realized and we were surprised that some of them had actually survived and they made babies.
So now we have about 50+ crawdads in here. There’s the red ones that we brought in and then some from a local lake that we had went out and harvested some and brought them in here to live.
The goal is to let these grow out for probably a year or a little over a year, and then hopefully they’ll make us some babies and then we will harvest them after about a year. So this is the pond that we keep them in. This is really easy to help them grow and maintain them. It’s a lot easier than a lake, and I would say they’re a lot happier because right here is an aerator down in there.
It causes the bubbles to come up and creates oxygen for them. We have a filter down in here and actually they like to hide out in here. None in here today, but down in there we have a pump and the pump pumps out the water and helps to clean the water. It sends the water, it’ll pump the water and send it up into this growing box. And then up there into the water bed. The water comes up into here, into the water bed to grow duck weed for the chickens and the ducks. This is the growing bed right now. It has pennyworts in it. I had a couple tomatoes that didn’t make it, so we’ll be able to plant more in here. The water filters through.
This is a filtration, so the water gets cleaned and falls down into here, and as it falls, it helps to create more bubbles and oxygen for the crawdads
So overall, this is a really good bed. A way to grow and keep your crawdads. The water lettuce is a food source for them. If you look really closely, sometimes you’ll see the crawdads crawling up underneath and eating the roots of the water lettuce. We also throw in a couple handfuls of fish food in here. Organic fish food for them to eat at.
This pond isn’t very deep. It’s about three feet. So it allows us to be able to easily catch the crawdads ads with our net and then we can also see through to the bottom so we can see how many crawdads we have and we’re able to harvest them and easily, easily catch them with our net.
This is what we learned so far with growing our crawdads is to make sure you have them in a proper containment and to not have too many crawdads in here because they are super territorial and will not have enough resources for themselves to grow and survive. Make sure the water’s cool with the proper filtration, and then also to make sure you’ll always have a food source such as the water lettuce for them.
Thank you for watching and we hope to be able to keep you updated on the progress and growth of these crawdads.
