Saturday 19th January 2008
Today's plans fell apart on several fronts, firstly Tom announced on Friday that he was not coming in today, as he had to start getting his stuff sorted in his flat, so that left the larger jobs out of the question.
So I changed plans and decided to sort shiro utsuri. These Omosako line babies were born in July and were quite small at harvest time. I selected around 100 larger ones to grow in October and left the rest in the mud pond. Since we have harvested these and are being held in a net for sorting and I thought this would be a good job for today.
There are many which show great qualities and will now be nurtured. The plan is to select out another 100 and they will be re-housed in the pond with the shusui and ochiba. They are smaller, so to give them the best chance they will be held in a floating net. Koi of the same size do better together and if small and large are kept in the same pond, normally the small do less well.
The shiro utsuri have only been in the concrete pond for around a week and the temperature has slowly been increased. This morning on checking, the shiro's were a little flicky, so decided to leave them for a few days. I've added no treatment at the moment and don't expect to, but I'll make sure all is well rather than transferring a problem to another pond.