We have been enjoying some warmer temperatures and the garden has delighted us with new flowers blooming weekly. The bleeding hearts and azaleas were followed by Columbine and Siberian Iris… and last week the peonies and morning glory have started their two to three weeks of showy beauty. The garden is filled with the scent of peonies and there’s some leftover lilac as well.


We madly finished up the bulk of our gardening this year in preparation for the koi club meeting at our home this weekend. Since gardening around the pond was on my list of activities, I was busy filling out and labeling 40 of the more interesting specimens. I worried that the wet weather would make our little rock goat path slippery but no one fell down.
Saturday morning came with scattered showers but thankfully the rain disappeared about 30 minutes before the meeting. We had a few activities planned and left time for questions the attendees might have. I’m a firm believer that we should talk about koi at every meeting and looking at koi is a lot of fun.





We got the koi club meeting wrapped up and round two were some family guests from out of town. They all seemed surprised when they actually visit the pond. Seeing a swimming pool sized pond is always different. Our guests always like to pet the koi – Irene is a pleasant subject since she will often swim right into the net.
The koi have been a lot hungrier with the warmer weather. I have upped the frequency of feeding and they are currently on JPD Shori (high growth, high protein). This is a floating food and we wanted to offer some sinkers as well. Last week a 40 pound bag of JPD Yamato (sinking, color, high digestibility) was delivered. The koi really love the Yamato stuff which we currently feed by hand.
We have also been spending the remainder of the weekend cleaning up the indoor pool. The pond builder is planning to do something different for this winter so he had to clean the liner, clean pipes, bead filters, dismantle stuff – generally stinky work. We used a fair amount of peroxide. And a new shop vac…
Not really sure what the pond builder has in mind but it should keep him occupied the rest of summer. Not having some major pond project going on is always a problem around here.
Meanwhile, I noticed that there is a corner of my yard that seems to be the deer snack bar. Raspberry canes, wisteria and tatarian dogwood were all nibbled recently. We have so much hosta in our yard which I thought was a deer favorite. All the hosta is untouched 😩.

The work around the koi ponds seems endless but it really is fun.
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