« Why I am beginning to hate olives - Goldfish in a rain barrel - update »

Goldfish in a Rain Barrel

21 July 2008
Written by: chris Posted under Misc, Rain Barrels General

 I have read a bit about people putting a 1″ gold fish in their rain barrels and having it grow to 6″ long. There is also the added bonus that they eat mosquito larvae as well! We don’t have mosquito problems with our barrels but the idea of having fish living in there was too good to pass up.  My kids wanted to get a fish for their bedrooms so during our trip to the local pet store I decided that we would make this into a more interesting experiment. The standard Comet Goldfish cost 27 cents at the Petsmart so we decided to pick up 15 of them. Each kid got 2 to put in a bowl in their rooms, the other 11 got dumped into our rain barrels.

We have 3 habitats  set up:

1 - A regular 220L rain barrel that has been emptied and filled a few times this year with 6 goldfish in it.

2 - A perfectly clean new 60L barrel with 5 goldfish in it.

3 - The kids fishbowls

I have also heard that the can survive the winter as well. I have my doubts about if they will survive an Ottawa winter but we will see.

It will be interesting to see which ones are happiest.


4 Responses to ' Goldfish in a Rain Barrel '

Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack to ' Goldfish in a Rain Barrel '.

  1. Rebecca said,

    on July 22nd, 2008 at 3:05 pm

    If a barrel sits in full sun the water may get too warm, and the goldfish could, uh, perish. In MN, homemade ponds have to be at least 4 feet deep for fish to survive in them over our winters. Not sure how that would vary for Ottawa, though.

  2. admin said,

    on July 22nd, 2008 at 8:47 pm

    Fortunately the barrel that we are using is well shaded. We try to keep them out of the sun to reduce the amount of evaporation as well.

    I suspect that Ottawa and Minnesota have very similar winters. Lots of snow and pretty cold. I am not even sure if our barrels would survive being full of water all winter. We will probably end up rescuing the fish some time in December just to keep the barrels intact.

  3. Elegant rain barrels said,

    on July 25th, 2008 at 9:54 am

    You could always think about installing a mesh screen guard to combat against any mosquitos. That’s if the goldfish idea doesn’t work!

  4. admin said,

    on July 25th, 2008 at 10:03 am

    We already have double reinforced screen on all of our barrels. With the number mosquitoes we have in our neighborhood it would be irresponsible not to. The Goldfish are really just an experiment in rain barrel survival. We are just testing to see if this is a valid option.

Leave a reply