Koi Page

What’s happening in the Koi Pond

I have changed things around a good bit.  Since many of my koi have found new homes, I have rearranged my operation.  I closed up the 6000 gallon pond and moved all the fish to the above ground pond. I had problems with UV lights, bead filters clogging pipes with leaves, green water, and other agrivations . I save water from the roofs and syphon or pump that water into the above ground pond or into the old 6000 gallon pond which I use for a large water reservoir.  I do not have to use treated tap water to fill my pond.  I also water my vegetable garden with pond water and save a lot of water cost.

Below are some of the koi we have had in the past.

Here is a photo of the pond as it looks today. August 20, 2011.IMGP2280

The information below was printed in 2009 but is still relevant today.

November 9, 2009
This is the time of year that the koi really start to slow down.  Since I do not have to be over at my office every day now that I am retired, I go in every two or three days just to make sure everything is OK.  This past weekend (November 4,5, and 6) we had our local Piedmont Koi and Watergarden Society show so I did not go over to check on my koi pond for about 4 days.

What a surprise when I got there. I know that I have a heron or two, and I am pretty sure I have a raccoon that plays around with my plants trying to catch the small koi that are in each of my plant containers.  The first thing that I saw was the empty blue tank that was full of babies.  On Saturday at the koi show, I had been bragging about the nice fish that had spawned in this tank in May.

Here is what happened.  We had a sale in May and I had placed all of our smaller fish up to about 6-7 inches in this tank overnight.  These fish were bagged in the morning of the sale and at the end of the day, I pumped all the water back into the main pond.  If you have not figured it out, water cost almost a penny a gallon so I did not see any reason to waste 700 gallons of perfectly good water.

I left about four inches of water in the tank simply because the pump did not suck it all out.  There also had been a rain so there was about six inches of water in the deepest end.  I looked down and saw a great number of fry swimming around in the water. Even at that early age, I could tell some were yellow and would probably grow up to be yamabuki ogans since I remember seeing a very nice but small fish swimming with the others.  It usually takes about three years for koi to breed well and this koi might have been that old, but was no more than eight inches, maybe more since it was a butterfly koi.

When I arrived this afternoon, the pond was completely empty and all the fish were gone, either buried under water hyacinth or eaten.

How did all that water get out ... the pond was absolutely empty.  I thought I was being smart earlier, in that I did not want to cut a hole in the tank for an overflow.  If I let the water come all the way to the top, the fish would swim or jump out.  What I did was screw a couple of fittings in the drain hole that was in the absolute bottom of the tank and fasten a standpipe to it.  A standpipe means that the top of the pipe goes straight up and I could cut off the pipe where I wanted the water level to be. By doing that the water level in the pipe would be the same as in the tank.

I should have fastened the standpipe to a stake driven in the ground to keep it from moving.   The stand pipe was laying flat on the ground and the best I can conclude is that a raccoon was messing around with the pond and pushed the stand pipe all the way to the ground.  Thus all the water drained out of the tank.   This happened twice before I had these fry in it and then I fixed it simply by raising the pipe.  I have now driven a stake in the ground next to the stand pipe and tied the stand pipe and the stake together so that no amount of weight could push the stand pipe to the ground.  I have since caught 3 racoons and one possum in a Have-a-Hart-Trap.

We learn our lessons the hard way.

jack

Enjoy the rolling photos of koi in our pond.        go to the next page  More Koi

 

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