KOI UK
maria hayward Netted and ready for selection
me to know the exact number in every pond. ThereÕs not enough time in the day to count them all!
Can you tell me how the pond runs and the gallonage etc? Yes, it is a 2,500-gallon pond filtered with Bakki Showers, plus a small vortex with Static K1 for fines removal. I use a Sequence ¼+ and an Aquamax 8000 to move the water. The water temperature is currently 24¡C and it will remain at this until the koi go into the mudpond around the second week of May.
So each koi has about ten gallons each. How much have you been feeding them and with what? They have been fed four or five times a day with my own food using 2mm pellets, although they are now ready to go up to 3 or 4mm pellets. I have fed slightly less and have not been pushing them as hard as in previous years.
How many times have you netted / sorted through the Sanke since I last saw them?
As you know we didnÕt net all the koi from the mud pond in November when you were last here due to not having enough time. So I have added about ten to15 more that youÕve not seen. Other than that I have not netted them or messed them about at all.
There are some Kohaku and Showa in with them. Is this down to pond space? Partly, but I have learned that it is necessary to keep the stocking level fairly high to give the young koi confidence to feed well and continue on a good development path as well as growth.
So you put as many koi into the pond as possible to help with this? Not exactly Ð itÕs a balancing act. ThereÕs a limit to how high you can stock a pond. If the numbers are too high it seems to make the young koi mature prematurely. This makes the beni (red) intensify and become hard. When kept in lower stocking levels the beni stays softer / more orange and this is what I am looking for in young koi.
I have fed slightly less and have not been pushing them as hard as in previous years
28 KOI CARP
Crikey, it’s tougher than it looks then. So when you talk about high stocking levels, how many koi would this be? For this to happen many more than your average hobbyist would ever have in a pond this size. IÕm talking 600 to 700 koi in one of these ponds.
So how many Sanke are in here? There are about 200 or so. I donÕt keep an exact count. I have too many koi on site for
How come?
I can achieve higher growth but this pushes the beni development to its limits. Keeping them slightly smaller puts less strain on the beni and the colour development can then keep pace with growth.
Have many failed? There was one Bekko placed in the pond and there is still only one, but over the last few weeks I have spotted one or two where the beni is looking weak and starting to recede, this is to be expected at this age. There have been no losses in the pond since your first visit.
So how many koi would you expect to keep from a spawning? From an approximate spawning of 200,000 I would expect to retain around 1,000. Of these 900 would only be good enough for the Garden Centre market. The other 100 hopefully would be of a quality worthy of growing to a larger size.
How many will be going back into the mudpond to grow through to Nisai from this batch then? ItÕs hard to say until final selection but I would hope to keep perhaps 40.
sorting the koi While we chatted Maurice and Lynn were
netting the pond and moving koi over to a pair of vats next to the pond. In one vat they placed koi which would not be grown any longer, whilst in the other they put the koi which would be given closer examination. As we began to take a look at these, Nadine started trying to locate the previously selected Ôtop tenÕ (see the February issue). Of
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