Wednesday 23rd January 2008
I took a few photos this morning, then walked down to snap a photo of one of the mud ponds, lifted the camera up toward my face and noticed the screen on the back was lit. On looking closer it said 'No card inserted', "dash it, dam and all that", I'd left the card in the card reader from last night! So no photos today.
After cleaning the filters, Tom spent the rest of the day working in the bottom of the mud ponds. With pond 14 now empty of fish and water, there are now just 3 with koi in, mud pond 1,2 and 3.
Those who visit the farm on a regular basis know that each year I rotate the spawning direction. This year, I shall start from Mud Pond 14 and work my way back. It is a long way to carry heavy female koi the the end tunnel, around 450ft in total and this year will be even harder, as Tom will be gone before spawning starts, so it will be single handed carrying 80cm+ koi in a plastic bag at arms length.
I'm not sure about you, but I'm missing the sun big time? At this time of year we often get frosts and by 9.00am on those frosty days, it gets nice and warm in the tunnels, as the sun always follows with clear blue sky's. I think we've had one sunny day this year!
I'd love to be able to predict when I will start spawning, but it really does lay with the weather. With lots of rain, as we are having at the moment, it really sets things back as it makes the water table higher than normal. So what I need is a nice long period with no rain and lots of sunshine to start drying the clay pond bottoms.
Spawning in March would be good, but looking how things are going at the moment, I'd say it will be more like April.
This year I plan to spawn 2 Kohaku sets, 2 Showa sets, 1 Sanke, 1 Chagoi, 1 Yamabuki, 1 Shiro Utsuri, 1 Kujaku. Plus if I can slip them in with other spawning, 1 Doitsu Doris Showa set, 1 Goromo and 1 Ochiba.
I have finish selecting the small shiro utsuri which spent the winter in the mud ponds, I've ended with more than I'd planned, but this gives me plenty of opportunity to reduce the numbers as they grow and 100 was just too few to get them feeding well in their floating net.