Bruce - I got a visitor and had to preempt my earlier post. The prenuptial says household appliance for refrigeration of
common food items. Assuming common means general household/kitchen. Your loophole is to buy your own used refrigerator or better yet buy your wife a new frig.
,,,
and use the old one in the garage for your refreshments, bait and etc. Depending on one's definition of home or dwelling and if it does not include the garage with home/dwelling, then you can put the bait frig in the garage. If the agreement includes garage in with the home/dwelling then you will need to house the extra frig in a shed or out building.
PS :: Remind your wife that shrimp, crab meat, clams or oysters from the market are included in the dreaded "invertebrates" category and the agreement has probably already been previously broken. Another taboo item that probably occurs in many wild caught fish (even from markets) more than realized is the rare incidental parasite that occassionally occur in fish flesh/fillets. These too are invertebrates and contribute to a previous violation of the agreement. Often these are very inconspicuous and always harmless when fish is cooked. Also the prenuptial does not specify dead or living invertebrates. Loopholes
. Note: I realize this may not be a real serious topic/thread - LOL. All wives have to be pretty tolerant to be married to a serious fisherman.
Redworms are easily grown in a compost pile. I have them in a compost pile shared by two houses. A family that has a garden can easily generate enough kitchen/garden waste to grow tens of thousands of rapidly reproducing worms. The worms like fresh table scraps and vegetable/fruit kitchen waste on a weekly basis. They are a major part of the decay process of this fresh organic material. The major disadvantage to these worms is they are small; dia 1/8" and 2" long. The other disadvantage is one has to pick thru decomposing garbage to collect the worms. The worms are most concentrated in the half rotted garbage and ocur sparsly in the fully composed more soil like material.
I have purchased high quality, large, sized nightcrawlers from Knutson's Recreational Sales in Brooklyn MI (1-800-292-9318-MI & 800-248-9318 US&Canada). They do not have a web site. They are primarily a bait and tackle wholesaler but do have a retail store. I have a wholesale account with them. You can get 1000 worms shipped to you for $48.00 plus shipping; not sure of ship costs to your location. 500 nightcrawlers=$27 and 2000= $94.00. You need a vendor's license.
Personally from my experience, I would scrap your idea to get these 15 older redears onto artificial feed; unless you currently need a real personal challenge. By the way - did the Ridgeview Fin Farm send you a reply to your email request? Just curious. (R.FinFarm will have 6"-7" feed trained eadears by spring). If you can get your 15 redears on feed, their offspring will also be fairly difficult to get habituated to feed. I think you will be much farther ahead if you start with either feed trained fingerlings / juvenile fish or try and train some 2" fingerlings yourself. Smaller fish train to feed much easier than older fish. I have learned that some older stubborn fish, even as small as 3", will starve rather than eat pellets. I currently have a few "stubborn" starving, perch in a cage with plump, growing, pellet, eating siblings. Training older redears will be quite difficult and very expensive in worm money and time as you are discovering. By the time you are done, these fish if trained will be worth about $20 to $50 each. The thing that I think will help you get your existing redears to eat pellets is to first soften the pellets and individually roll them so they are shaped like a Physa snail and sink along with decending worm pieces. Since your fish are not currently eating your pellets, these fish have already "learned" or have been conditioned to ignore normal hard floating-sinking pellets. As I see it at this point, using softened pellets will be your simplest and quickest solution to training them to eat fish food if in reality they are "trainable".
