Since 2012, I have purchased 68 koi (number 67 and 68 are the goromo koi being delivered by the dealer this Friday). Number 65 and 66 have been a little problematic. One of them, the little yellow hariwake jumped out of the quarantine tank at night through a space that I did not think it would jump through. Lesson learned – net even the smallest gaps for these tiny guys. The other problem child is a kin ki utsuri, named Bert, who is doing a really good job of playing dead. Maybe swim bladder issue, maybe a weakling…I have purchased many koi from this dealer and all of them have always been in perfect health. So I have taken little Bert out of the quarantine tank and into a bucket with some medicine and an aerator. Maybe he’ll come back – I have had koi look like this after winter in the outdoor pond and revived them in the same manner.

So koi number 64 is the latest goshiki, named Ernie. We caught a shusui named Coho to be the quarantine mate for Ernie and the inbound goromos. The pond digger is building their quarantine home in the garage since they will not fit in the 50 gallon quarantine tank. Spending a few weeks in almost 300 gallons should be comfy for these koi. The nice thing is that we’ll be able to keep a very close eye on them. The larger ponds are nice but to retrieve any of the koi is very difficult. To catch Coho, the pond digger had to go swimming with the koi. I’m thinking about investing in a seine net for future catching needs. Coho is our expendable shusui. Unlike Chinook, Coho has developed a lot of sumi freckles which is an undesirable trait. We have a couple of koi in our pond that may look nice but upon closer inspection, you know that their patterning is really less than ideal. While I’ll be sorry to see them go, I’ll need to make room in the pond for future koi. Plus I don’t want to go into winter with a lot of koi – it’s just a bigger load to manage. Many advanced koi keepers will buy only one or two koi a year. I’m not there yet – particularly since I love the randomness of buying a bunch of tosai and seeing what they look like after a few months.

I was telling Kevin Pham of Genkikoi that I would like to buy another tosai batch this winter and he said something like ‘no, I don’t want to sell you koi in the winter, since Minnesota winters are so long.’ Since I do believe he is one of the smartest koi guys around, I’ll have to wait for the random batch in late April 2016…