News / Media
January / February
While the cold and wet weather might not be good for our spirits it has been good for the fish! The prospect of spring weather is very appealing.
Our fish are growing well and the first batch of our fish from last summer are nearly up to market size. It's a good job too. We need the room, we've got 200,000 5 gram trout arriving in May!
September
We have had a busy few weeks. The Really Wild Food Festival was a big success for us. There was good weather and our pate and smoked trout lunch pots made excellent al fresco lunches!
It was while we were at this festival that we heard that we were featured in The Sunday Times. Haverfordwest Farmers' Market was reviewed in the Sunday Times as part of an article on Pembrokeshire. Article
The pond building continues at Vicar’s Mill Trout Farm. Fingers crossed that the boys will have finished round pond 1 and 2 by the middle of September. Our fingerlings are feeding really well and they are more than ready to be split in order for them to have more room to grow.
Merthyr Angling Association paid a visit to the farm at the end of August. They came to clip the adipose fin of 1000 6” brown trout that they have bought to put in the Talybont Reservoir. It was a successful day. There are photos to view in our gallery and also on their website. www.mtaa.co.uk and click on Talybont Reservoir.
Don’t forget to visit us at the Narberth Food Festival on 22 and 23 September!
July/August
Although there has not been the wonderful warm weather that we were all hoping for this summer - it has been good fish farming weather!
We have had some sad news. Our shiny, new sign that we put on the main road has been stolen. We mounted a search campaign and have offered a reward. The kind people of Llandissilio and Clunderwen have been tracking the progress of our search but we suspect that poor Roger is probably in a field somewhere. If you see a Vicar's Mill Trout Farm Shop sign please can you return it!
Our pond renovations are coming on well and we hope to be able to use two more in the next few weeks. The records that we inherited when we bought the farm show that these ponds have not been working for approximately ten years. It's a fairly significant achievement for Matt and Steve. No doubt we'll take some pictures to put on here.
We will be at the following food festivals in August and September: Crymych Food Festival, Really Wild Food Festival and Narberth Food Festival.
Use the links to the festival websites to find out more information:
www.reallywildfestival.co.uk
www.narberthfoodfestival.co.uk
June
We have bought in over 130,000 small Rainbow fry to enable us to produce over a tonne of fish a week in the coming year. The summer showers have been a welcome reprieve from the earlier drought and the fish are looking very healthy.
We have won a couple of wholesale contracts and have started to produce our own smoked trout pate which is proving very popular.
Listen out for us on Radio Pembrokeshire on Friday 29th June at 9.15am where we are the ‘At work network’!
May
The hot weather has sent people racing for their barbecues in preparation for the bank holiday weekend. Our trout steaks have proved to be a popular choice as they are easier to cook - no foil needed.
We have just taken delivery of 20,000 brown trout. They are very small at the moment and won't be ready for our angling clubs until 2009. Let's hope that we will get some rain before then!