Way back in March, I told my backyard pond story. If you missed it, you can find it in the archives. Today I'm going to get more into the story of my pond's primary inhabitants -- the fish.

Yes, I know I promo'd this yesterday as "Trouble in the Pond," and I'll get into that later. First a little background ...

We started out with a much smaller pond by buying a kit that included two plants and four fancy goldfish (Red Comets, to be exact). We added four more fish that first year -- fancy Shebunkins. Shebunkins are basically more colorful goldfish. They don't require additional care or specific water conditions like Koi, but they come in color combinations similar to the beautiful Japanese carp. Red, gold, silver, black, spreckled or paint, Shebunkins are every bit as beautiful, just not as expensive.

Anyway, the following year our fish gave us four babies that survived spawning season (the fish tend to eat their young, and since they give birth by the hundreds, this is not a bad thing). But before that, I went and bought four more, never thinking in a million years that they would breed!

So now we're up to 16 fish in a 240-gallon pond. (We upgraded to a bigger pond two years ago, because the fish were getting too big for our original pond.) Our biggest fish is almost a foot long from nose to tail tip (and since, she's so big and white, we call her "Moby"), and the other "original" fish are almost the same.

Well last summer, the fish got really busy in the new pond and as far as we can tell, we have about 30-32 fish now (it's hard to count accurately when they're all swimming around). Don't get me wrong, we totally enjoyed watching the tiny babies last year, especially at night. Our pond has three underwater lights, so at night we can spy on the fish and they don't really see us. When we first discovered them, they were only a few millimeters long. All survived the winter and are about 4-5 inches now.

This is all great, except having too many fish in a small pond is not good for them. We have to clean the filter twice as much (that's twice a week in prime summer months), because naturally, they make more waste. And, over the winter in January, I spotted a tiny white fish that must have been born sometime in December (isn't that against the rules of nature?), followed by the discovery just last month of a tiny black fish (the black ones are really hard to see) that was probably born the same time.

Now on to the Trouble in the Pond -- Just the other day I noticed one of our big white Comets (not Moby) looking particularly huge toward her tail section. I think she's pregnant!!! and it's only April (well, actually it's May as of today). In the past the fish waited at least until June to give birth, which means, this is just the first pregnancy of the season ...

I think I'll be having a fish sale this summer!