A week in the life of a koi farmer (wc 6_5)
We are making progress with the new season koi fry, and they are growing well in the fry ponds. These are from the kohaku and the shusui and doitsu ochiba spawnings.
A few snags, as there always seems to be. We'd noticed numbers dropping in the fry pond with the babies off our new Sakai kohaku female and noticed signs of another creature living in the pond. So, for the first time this year we unwrapped the seine net and dragged the pond; and captured this Little Grebe.
It's the first time we've found a Little Grebe on site. Moorhens and Ducks are the norm. Obviously the odd Heron too.
As attractive as this little bird is, it is probably behind predation of some of our young koi fry so moved out of the pond area.
We were holding some stock of spare 2-3 week kohaku fry with the view to selling them. But these are now being used to back fill the losses on site.
The Doitsu Ochiba / Shusui fry are doing well and these too are now out in the fry ponds. Again, we were hoping to have spares of these too, but in the end they've all been required to stock our own ponds.
We have another pond cycling ready to take the output from our Mukashi spawning this week. Opaline is a female Mukashi Ogon we brought in last year as a 94cm 7 year old; and she's now 96cm with the rest of this growing season to come. The spawning has been one of the more successful this year and the eggs have been hatchling during the course of today.
Here's our female Mukashi Ogon called Opaline, just after spawning. The bowl is just over 1m long. As well as being very large, Opaline has incredible fukurin and the metallic shine has a particular look, like the colours of the rainbow are reflected back off her as she swims past. It's really striking , and we've been looking forward to getting a decent spawning off her since last year.
We bought her at around the same time as Oakly, and spawned her last year but had no product from the eggs. This year's spawning has been a completely different affair and with Opaline showing potential to get to and potentially exceed 1m, her offspring are a high priority for us this year.
We've also been preparing our other fry ponds for fry, and we've had a lot of strand algae to clear which is very time consuming. It's important work, because the next two ponds will hopefully be laid to Showa and Shiro Utsuri. That's the next round of spawnings, due to start in around a week.
Just before I go, please enjoy a few pictures from around the ake nisai growing on tanks this week
The ake nisai shiro utsuri are showing great promise.
Finally, as hard as we are working right now, an evening feed of the fry ponds with the sun setting and illuminating the grasses after a warm day is never a chore
