Ready for the trout season? Get your appetite in trim. But you haven't got him, remember, until he's flapping in the creel. You may whip a pool to a rich creamy lather, yet go home without a blessed trout for dinner. Attention, worm-dunker! Attention, fly expert! Here's a way to insure yourself a fine treat in trout. Cast a fly in a purling stream at Green Spring Farm, Newville, Pennsylvania, where brook trout by the hundreds flip their tails in the green shadows—reel in a fine dinner! A dozen fat beauties weighing maybe half a pound apiece, eleven inches long, the ideal table size, are yours for the asking along with a check for ＄9.75. Express is prepaid east of the Mississippi.
Here's trout grown in spring water, pampered on a diet of fresh liver an fish. Here are fish netted just when they come to perfection for the platter; gutted, washed, and within ten minutes packed in a vaporproof bag and into the freezer held 20 degrees below zero. This speed handling and low temperature freezing lock in the sweet flavor, preserve the texture of the firm flesh. Orders are shipped in double-lined cartons with enough dry ice to keep the trout frozen for three days.
The trout are raised by two Baltimore businessmen who make the business their hobby and week-end recreation. Colin J. S. Thomas, investment counsel, and his banker friend, Samuel Shriver, have been fresh-water anglers since boyhood days; for many years they have fished and hunted together over week ends and on vacations. Trailing trout streams, they cooked their catch as they caught it and marveled at the wonderful flavor. Trout they carried home never tasted the same. One of the fishermen had the bright idea of carrying along dry ice and freezing the catch as it came from the water, then home to defrost for the frying pan. Trout thus treated, they discovered, tasted exactly like that fresh from the hook.
An idea there, why not raise trout to sell frozen by mail? There were plenty of trout hatcheries raising fish for stocking streams but few were raising them for food, none was selling fish frozen a moment after catching.
The friends decided to pool money on the venture. First came the search for a place with ample spring water. An abandoned water cress farm prove the right spot with its spring yielding 3,000 gallons of water a minute. Green Spring it was called, a spring used by the Indians in Colonial times.
Two years ago the work began on readying the farm for the trout-raising business. The State of Pennsylvania Fish Commission gave advice on laying out the ponds and locating the freezing plant. Today the growing and breeding ponds cover three acres holding 100,000 brook, brown, and rainbow trout, ranging from four to twelve inches. Wesley Henry, a 38-year-old Pennsylvanian who has spent seventeen years of his life working in fish hatcheries, is the farm manager. His pet theme on trout raising is the feeding of a balanced ration during the spawning season. That, he says, is what produces the “whopper”fish at maturity.
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