Product Description

Riotte explains siting a pond, maintaining water quality, troubleshooting, stocking with fish, plus plenty of old-time fishing lore and scrumptious fresh fish recipes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #917987 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From the Back Cover
One of America's most beloved garden writers reflects on life with a pond.

Whether it's fishing by moonlight, planting iris and weeping willows, catching crawfish, or supervising an unruly crowd of ducks, Louise Riotte knows how to get the most fun out of a family pond. She shares her experiences in this entertaining book, presented with her trademark mix of facts, anecdotes, lore, and lively humor.
Catfish Ponds & Lily Pads includes:

-- How the Riotte family built a pond
-- Tips on fish farming with catfish, bass, or trout
-- Creating a backyard pool for frogs and water lilies
-- Waterside plants - beneficial and harmful
-- Recipes, stories, and fascinating asides

About the Author
Beloved Storey author and life-long gardener Louise Riotte passed away in 1998 at the age of 89. She wrote 12 books on gardening, companion planting, and garden lore, among them the ever-popular Carrots Love Tomatoes, which has sold approximately 515,000 copies. Her father taught her to believe in and practice astrology, while her mother was a practicing herbalist. Together they inevitably influenced her life and her books, Roses Love Garlic, Astrological Gardening, Sleeping with a Sunflower, Catfish Ponds & Lily Pads, and her most recent book, Raising Animals by the Moon. Her own line drawings are included in all her books. Before authoring books, Riotte was a ghost writer for Simon & Schuster and for Jerry Baker's radio gardening show, and she wrote a number of articles for Organic Gardening as well. Riotte took pride in her garden near her home in Ardmore, Oklahoma, which her son Eugene helped care for in her later years.

Customer Reviews

Not Very Helpful
I found that this book would have been helpful for pond plants or if I needed a recipe to cook something I had raised in a pond, but I wanted information on keeping fish in a pond. Specifically I was interested in catfish, and silly me, I 'judged the book by its cover.' This book provides very little helpful infomation on raising pond fish as a hobby. If you're interested in spending several thousand dollars to commercially raise fish such as trout, then this book has something to offer. Otherwise don't bother.

Bad Rodale Books revisited. Where's the meat?
Mostly touchy feely pointless antedotes. At most one page of useful information.

A poetic account of country living.
This is a beautifully written book! It contains many whimsical anecdotes on the process of building a pond, also much practical information on plants, fish, frogs, turtles, and ducks. Having just built a pond, I found this book just the ticket. It doesn't have much about the actual digging and construction--that information is best obtained from your local Soil and Water Conservation Office. But I highly recommend this book if you're building a "real" pond (not one of those plastic pool things).