Catching Up - The Spawning & The Giveaway

In my post, You Capture - Water, last week I mentioned that the koi had spawned and I talked about how I had harvested the eggs because if you don't the koi will quickly eat them.

This year I was in a bit of a tight spot because at 6:30 AM, I had to take Mr. Right to work because his car was in the expensive car hospital so I pulled the egg laden plants before I left, even though I knew there was a chance that fertilization hadn't taken place. This first batch I put in the large aquarium in the house and not a single koi fry has emerged - not one.

The rest, as I mentioned in last week's post, were put in the small access pond and a few of them weren't put there until I got back. Then over this busy holiday weekend, as I peered into the water searching for a sign of life, I spotted quite a few tiny little threads moving around. Wow! How awesome would it be if they would just thrive outside without too much interference from me.

Unfortunately, I'm not very optimistic. There are so many things that threaten them mostly because they are so tiny and fragile.

Most worrisome right now are the strange little black bugs in there that might or might not be eating them. I tried to catch one of those potential predators but couldn't and instead I scooped up a fragile little koi baby which promptly died.

Then there's the challenge of feeding them. Should I? I just don't know. Most sites suggest egg yolk or the dust from the bottom of the fish food box but last time we had a spawning I think I killed a lot of them by overfeeding them. Even though I tried hard not to, I think I gave them more than they could eat (which believe me isn't much) and it fouled the water.

Speaking of fouling the water, I can't really run the pumps that provide filtering and aeration because these tiny little bodies would easily be sucked into it and ground to ... you know...nothing.

So I'll give them maybe two pieces of fish food, crumbled into dust, every day; and hope that they can live mostly on the algae that's forming in there. I'll turn off the pumps, or maybe put some fine mesh nylon over it so no innocent babes can be sucked in. Then I'll try to leave them alone. Maybe I'll cross my fingers, too. That should work as well as anything else I've done in the past.

Now for the Walgreens Gift Basket Giveway. I realized early on that Friday night of a busy holiday weekend was probably the worst time to end the comment entries, but I said it so I stuck to it.

There were a total of nine comments and last night I wrote the numbers one through nine on equal sized pieces of paper. I folded them as exactly alike as I could and put them in a bowl. Mr. Right drew out number 7. In checking I see that the 7th comment was made by Sarah so, Sarah, if you'll send me your address, I'll forward it to Walgreens and your gift basket should be on the way. Congratulations!

You Capture - Water

Beth's You Capture subject this week is water and that really worked out for me on several levels.

First we went to a birthday party near Coldwater, Michigan where the kids and some of the adults spent a fair amount of time floating and playing in the water.

Then there was all kinds of activity going on in our koi pond this week. There's no accurate way to predict when it will happen, but Monday morning a spawning finally occurred. If you've never seen a koi spawning, you're really missing out because it's spectacular. The fish fly around the pond bumping and jumping and turning the water into a varitable cauldron of water, plants, and fish. You can hear the splashing in the house with the doors and windows closed. You'd probably be hard-pressed to pick the fish out of this picture but, trust me, they're in there.

By late yesterday evening, peace was restored and once again the pond was calm and quiet.

During the day, I wasn't the only one watching the show.

And now the plants with fertilized eggs firmly attached to their roots, float quietly in the small annex pond where no fish can feast on them. (Koi seem to consider their fertilized eggs the ultimate delicacy.)

For more water pictures, visit Beth at I Should Be Folding Laundry.

Always Something With The Fish

Sometimes I think the best way to ease a worried mind is to throw yourself into something like a great big project.

So today that's what we did.

My granddaughter, her husband, and Superbaby have been staying with us and they've always taken a very gratifying interest in the koi and every aspect of koi care. They were here when we finally had our spawning and they were very instrumental in collecting so many eggs that we had such a large hatch.

So I've been musing about what to do with the babies. We have a large pond with 13 large koi. We have a smaller pond for the purpose of quarantining new fish to be sure they're disease free before introducing them to the large koi population. That pond used to have 3 grown goldfish only Then this Spring just to make the koi look bad, they started spawning like madmen or mad fish. There were so many baby goldfish in there that when you fed them the surface of the water just churned with fish. Finally we had to release the 3 parents into the wild to stop the population explosion.

Then we had the aquarium and two tubs with baby koi. And the koi are the fish I value.

When we had to find places to put the unhatched eggs back in June, we removed the 3 fish that were in the aquarium. There was one algae eater and two long, skinny, fast-as-lightening tropical fish. We put them in the goldfish pond, crossing our fingers that they would be fine as long as the weather was warm.

Today we decided that we'd take all the goldfish out of their little pond and put all the baby koi into it at least until cold weather sets in (which I realize is probably sooner than we were thinking).

So we netted all the goldfish and put them in two buckets. Big Daddy was in there (more commonly known as Fat Bastard) and we put him in the big pond with the big, honkin' koi and crossed our fingers again. Then we put two more suspected baby koi in the tubs.

Now we had two buckets teeming with baby goldfish and the two long, skinny, fast-as-lightening tropical fish who seemed to have grown significantly. We dumped the algae eater back in the aquarium assuming that he was interested in eating koi eggs and itty, bitty, tiny koi fry and not the slightly bigger little guys that are in there now. Then we came in for lunch. Before we did I noticed that a lot of the goldfish in one of the buckets were hovering near the top and I commented that I thought they needed more air. But you know me and thinking I had more time, I thought to take care of it after lunch.

When I walked back out, one of the long, skinny, fast-as-lightening tropical fish was laying on the ground, dead of course and the other long, skinny, fast-as-lightening tropical fish was laying in the bottom of the bucket, also dead. And the little goldfish were dying in droves.

So I raced to Meijer and bought two aerators and the necessary accessories to keep alive the goldfish that we were desperately trying to figure out how to get rid of. $20 to keep fish alive that we didn't want...... at all. Sometimes I defy all logic.

They're doing quite well now. They have plenty of air and I'm confident they'll be fine until morning. But what do we do with them then? Any ideas? If we put them in a pond somewhere, would they upset the ecological balance? I need some ideas.

Oh, and as for Big Daddy alias Fat Bastard, he was swimming around happily, came up to partake of dinner when we fed everybody, and generally seemed to adjust very well. That is until all the giant koi came down to that corner to clean up the dinner scraps that had drifted over there and had their usual feeding frenzy. After that, we didn't see him again. I guess he's either scared to death and hiding or eaten to death and dead.

So the day was successful. The small pond is clean and waiting for baby koi and I was so busy that I my mind was diverted from that uneasy feeling. I'm pretty sure it was your prayers that set me on the road to that project. Thank you all very much.

They're Swimming!

They're swimming and there's lots of them.

Yesterday I talked about our miraculously big spawning event and today I'm updating you on the babies.

In the aquarium in the house there are hundreds of koi fry (babies). In the larger tub outside, our grandson-in-law counted between 30 and 50 and in the small tub he saw about 10.

Although they're supposed to be stuck to the plants and walls of the abode by the sticky pad on their heads for 3 to 5 days, they're swimming around like crazy. That sticking thing lasted less than 24 hours.

Now the trick is to feed them enough but not too much and to keep as many alive as possible. I'm still in disbelief that this has happened. It's absolutely awesome so far!

Cross your fingers for us. Hopefully we're in it for the long haul.

I Was Starting To Think It Wasn't Going To Happen For Me

We started digging our first water garden in 2001 after a family get together when Beth looked out the patio window and said, let's start your pond. We'd talked about it and procrastinated about it for years and we didn't make a move until Beth moved us. She said, "Let's go lay out the shape with a garden house". After that we never looked back. Our first liner was a tarp we bought at Lowes and it served us well for a long time.

Our first fish were goldfish we got from my sister and a couple of koi that we bought. I was anxious to have baby koi but since we didn't, I blamed the goldfish and declared that they'd all have to go so that our koi could reproduce. But they didn't.

We finally had a nice group of koi but I knew we needed one larger individual to start the reproduction process. We bought about a 20" beauty from a reputable garden center that specialized in water gardens and shortly after we introduced him to our pond, we realized he was really, really sick. He died but not before he infected all the rest of the fish. All of them got sick, and only 3 survived. It was heartbreaking.

So we started restocking. I realized that I'd rather have a few nice quality koi as brood stock than 20 poorer quality. We spent $200 on a gorgeous sanke and $80 on a mate for her who was almost as beautiful as she was. In total we had about 15 very nice koi. Then there was a terrible thunderstorm and our koi pond was between where the lightening struck about 150 yards away and the porch light on the back of our house that it traveled to. My granddaughter took pictures of the heavy rain and you could clearly see the fish swimming about. After the lightening strike, they were all dead.

If I was heartbroken the first time, I was broken the second time. It happened in August and I couldn't even think of restocking. The koi pond became an unsightly mess that we tried to avoid looking at. We didn't protect it over winter and didn't clean it in the Spring. Then our son told us that he and his family were coming to visit and that they were stopping at the Kloubec Koi Farm in Iowa to bring us koi for our pond.

Mr. Right and I went out and started cleaning feverishly and had the old pond presentable before the new koi arrived. That was two years ago. Last year we added a larger koi that we also purchased at Kloubec Koi Farm.

And last Friday night we started seeing signs of a potential spawning event. And Saturday morning at 5:20 I watched the frenzy that was the spawning I'd been dreaming of. Thank God that my granddaughter and her husband were here to help me collect the eggs. (If you don't collect them, the koi promptly eat them.)

We put some in the aquarium and some in two tubs behind the house not far from the koi ponds.

And tonight we have lots of little pairs of eyes dragging around a tail. And we're bursting with pride and joy. If I had anybody to give them to, I'd pass out cigars.

And now, all we have to do is keep them alive.