Summer is always so nice in Minnesota and we all love the first cooler days of Fall. The koi look prettier in the cooler waters and everything seems pretty nice until the first leaves start to drop. My gardens start looking tired and plants are dying off. I usually try to cut back many of…
Category: My koi
Mud Pond Harvests – not too sexy but a lot of fun
Koi breeders believe that koi summering in the mud pond is a good thing. If you can imagine that you go to the spa for a few hours of a beautifying mud treatment – these koi go in for a few months. The end result is some impressive growth and their skin looks good too….
Summer is over :-(
It’s Fall now and I feel I have missed a great deal of the beautiful Minnesota summer this year. I certainly have been a little behind in posting, so I’m going to play catch up. Mostly photos but read the captions… First up is a video of the koi taken about a week ago. All…
Cleaning up the Lower Pond
Our lower pond has been taken over by string algae! The algae had gotten so thick it was clogging up the bottom drain. The pond digger decided that drastic action needed to be taken and he drained the pond. Over ten hours, he thoroughly scrubbed the walls of string algae. While the pond was being…
Billy the Kid is Baby Champion B at the 2016 UMKC Koi Show
I’ve been a little behind in blogging and so many things have happened in the last two weeks. I was on holiday in beautiful Lake Louise, Canada when I had a little accident on a trail ride. I ended up in the Banff emergency room with a 15 cm laceration on my lower leg and…
Comparing the Shiro Utsuri Tosai
This year I started a project to purchase Omosako shiro utsuri tosai and watch them grow. The original six that I purchased from Genki Nishikigoi had different sumi looks. Sadly, one of them, Jesse James was picked off by some predator. I did add two more shiros, a small one purchased through the Koi Acres…
Checking Tosai & Tearing Down a Shed
We have a little more time to do some fun stuff with the koi. The upper pond koi are growing before our eyes and eating a ton of food. Everyone except Nora. I think Nora is my vegan koi – she is always eating algae and doesn’t really seem to care for the koi food…
Konishi Karashigoi !!
They’re finally here – Konishi karashigoi! Tony, the pond digger, watched a little video two years ago about the Konishi karashigoi that grow to be 400 pounds. He increased the depth of the pond and changed up many filtration features to grow his “little porpoises.” Last year, Tony talked to Kevin Pham of Genki Nishikigoi,…
Sunday gardening
Another pleasant day outside working on smaller garden projects. So far this weekend, the pond digger has redone a portion of the fence sections, cleaned up/recycled old pond liner, cleaned up the wood scrap pile, spread at least 15 bags of pea gravel, replanted a number of plants for me and made a grape vine…
“Do you have a picture of this?”
It’s not even July 1 and our major pond structures and landscaping are done. It’s actually unsettling to have all this time to do more bike riding, hang around, relax more…the pond digger is having a little work withdrawal symptoms. However, I can not say enough about our contractor. He promised us a July finish…
Thinking about another pond…
The last bushes have been put into the ground, the shade feature might get done this week and we’re also waiting for the last few koi to come home this week. Now the ponds are purely maintenance and there’s not much work except to watch the koi, stay on top of the weeding and monitor…
Koi can be addictive … Meet my dealers
This weekend is the annual MPKS show at the McCook MAX, about 20 minutes south of Chicago. The pond digger and I flew out since I was showing a koi and we had some friends and family in the area. The show is held in an air conditioned venue, soft floor and it’s a nice…
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