Decisions, and more decisions.
Things are going as well as I could have hoped in the fry pond; daphnia are blooming and the fry seem content. And, you can see fry all around the pond which is encouraging.
We've been doing some maintenance, like stitching up joins and holes in the netting covering our ponds to keep the ducks out. Even though the ponds are netted, this year with a 2 inch mesh sized net - we still found the odd duck penetrating. Amanda took some thin rope and weaved it through the net mesh to effect a good join between nets and also patched up the odd hole/
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| Our standard poodle, "Jet" on duck watch. |
And, I kicked off two showa spawnings. But, unfortunately neither came off.
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| I laid out the ropes with extra care and love, but she didnt want to spawn |
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| Just need to get that head pattern and the glossy black style sumi (black colour) onto some showa fry! |
With both showa sets having a hiccup, I've some decisions to make about how closely I stick with my plan of filling the fry ponds with one kohaku and one showa spawning, and then doing the same with the two indoor tanks.
The second pond outside has cycled and is ready for hatchlings. Problem is, I don't have any! With the showa females not playing ball, the next in line would be the kohaku and shiro females I spawned successfully last year. Shiro are not part of my plan, but the "loch ness" shiro's as I called them from last year gave a tantalising glimpse that the parent set might produce some good sized fish. Kohaku are ofcourse part of my plan, and there would be some interesting learning from running a second kohaku spawning and giving them the second fry pond outside. You might remember there were some pretty looking fry from that kohaku female last year ....
But, that would leave me only the indoor tanks for the showa, and I've invested quite heavily in my showa parent sets so I'd really like to run with at least one of them outside.
I will take a day or two to work out the best approach.
A highlight this weekend was Kevin Ellis popping over to check out my set up and the project. He makes the Koi Nerding videos (Click here to see Kevin's videos) which are fun to watch and well worth checking out, and looks like I'll be in the next one....
