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…

Another missing koi :-(

Actually two more missing koi! At lunchtime we were sitting by the pond and noticed that Dale was missing. Once again a search of the RDF and nothing. Tonight we looked in the pond and realized that Jet Li is also missing. The pond digger tried blowing the TPRs harder but the little guys were…

Staying on top of the shiro utsuris

Keeping small and large shiro utsuris is fun, interesting and maddening. Yesterday I decided to bowl the seven shiro utsuri tosais to document appearance changes. In the lower pond, four of them took me almost 45 minutes to catch and I gave up on Black Jack and Belle Star. While I was trying to catch…

Making progress around the ponds…

All the koi are finally in the pond. We had one goshiki in quarantine but Carmen seemed very sad and lonely. So we decided to shorten quarantine for Carmen as well. The koi are all swimming around the pond and enjoying being in the school of big koi and the school of little koi. I’m…

A Lucky Koi Keeper

I’m pretty lucky to be married to someone who works so hard to build exactly what I want. Today the pond digger and I worked on the waterfall. The landscape designer suggested we put a little curve in it. The pond digger saw a photo on Facebook of the waterfalls at the Mirage in Las…

Koi shopping

Every year, Koi Acres in Scandia, MN has an open house and one really fun activity is the koi and equipment auction. Great deals on all sorts of koi. Plus it’s just fun to bid on koi. We ended up bringing home six new koi. Most of them are tosai. While many people like to…

Taking a Break – Hosting a koi club meeting

We took a little break today to host the local koi club meeting. The only work the pond digger did today was to install a UV filter on the upper pond. He’s been doing a great job installing everything neatly in the equipment pits. He’s had some difficulty with the new structure – being quite…

Shiros in the Lower Pond

The lower pond is finally open and some of the koi are enjoying life outdoors again. We first put in Jet Li, a  Kikokuryu to test out the pond.  Since it’s always sad to have only one koi, we let Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid swim around for the evening with Jet Li. I…

Sunshine or Rain – we got a lot of work done

A ton of work was completed this weekend: The lower pond was started up with almost all of the equipment hooked up!  The pond digger finished up the work in between raindrops today.  See this PAGE for photos. The upper pond waterfall was cleared and is ready for changes. Near the upper pond waterfall, the little…

Another day in the garden

Lots of work still going around the equipment pit. The pond digger has undone some of the old concrete and poured some new concrete to accommodate the moving bed filter in a different spot. Since the equipment area is going to be a busy zone, we dug up the plants. The pond digger tries to…