Devin's Pond

Harvest

The days are getting shorter and the nights cooler as we are entering fall, so it was time to harvest my pond. Without warm water the outdoor growing season is coming to a close, so there is no point in leaving the fish out while they could be growing at a faster rate in an indoor controlled environment. I set up a 500 liter tank with built in trickle filter to house my kohaku for the winter in preparation for the harvest. With everything ready and in place I pulled my pond on the 4th of October, four weeks since the last (3rd) cull on the 6th of September.

While I was in Minnesota for the koi show my pond had a bloom of hair algae, so instead of dragging a seine net to catch the fish; I decided to drain the pond down. Also, because there was under 100 fish left over from the last cull, it would be less work just to drain the water out. Once it was down to about 10 cm of water depth I plugged the drain and caught as many of the koi that could be easily netted. Then I proceeded to drain the pond completely, catching the left over fish as the water ran out.

In total there was 81 koi, so somewhere in the four weeks since the last cull one of the fish disappeared. In the final pond side cull I threw out 26 fish that didn't turn out so well, or look like they had any potential to get better. Bringing the total down to 55 fish, with 12 of them being somewhat good and 3 of them fairly good. They ranged in size from 10 to 15 cm in length, had the water not gone bad with hair algae bloom; I would have expected them to have reached 15 to 20 cm in length.

My pond was the last of all the tosai ponds to be harvested this year. I thought I would have pulled it much earlier, but we have just been so busy that I never had any free time to do it. 55 fish is quite a bit for a 500 liter tank, but as the year goes on I'll continue to cull down the kohaku. By next spring I hope to grow them out to around 30+ cm, so the ones the aren't turning out will have to go to make room for the others.


Mark Gardener has been following the development of my kohaku, his blog and eMagazine Niigata Nishikigoi Digest, it can be viewed at www.niigata-nishikigoi.com