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The Fundamentals Of Keeping Koi
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Are you thinking about putting a koi carp pond in your garden? A koi fish pond is a great improvement to any garden. A garden pond is totally relaxing: watching the fish going about their every day lives is relaxing and listening to the sound of the water moving is relaxing as well. Koi carp are a good selection over some other fish because they grow fairly big and breed freely even in captivity.
They are not that difficult to take care of either. As with all fish ponds, you have to maintain the quality of the water, but that is not so difficult when you know what you are doing. Once you have got the water right, the rest will follow more or less automatically, although you will have to check it frequently.
Having said that, you should not just hurry out in to the garden, dig a hole and fill it with fish. You need to buff up on the subject first, but there is so much information on koi on the market, that you will have no difficulty in that respect. There is also lots of information on the Internet.
The first thing to do is dig a hole for your pond, but it better not to have it uniformly deep. It ought to be three or four feet deep at one end and a foot or so deep at the other. The koi will overwinter and sleep in the deeper water, but only the fry will feel comfortable in the shallow end. They will take sanctuary there to avoid being eaten by the larger fish. Like most fish, koi are cannibals.
Once your pond has been dug out, fill it with water and leave it for a week. Use this week to test your water features such as the water pumps, the filter and the fountain. If you are losing water try to plug the leak. If you have to keep topping up the water level from the hosepipe, you will almost certainly run into hardship with chlorine.
After a week, the chlorine in that tap water will have dissipated and any surplus oil in your pond apparatus will have been flushed out, so you can put aquatic plants in. Plant them in pots so that you can move them easily if you want. You should also construct some underwater caves for the fish to conceal themselves in.
When you are satisfied that everything is working well and that the environment is stable (this is easier to do in larger ponds), you can think about purchasing some koi.
You have to make a decision why you would like to have koi. Do you want to show them and possibly earn some money? In that case you will have to start with expensive fish, but if you just want to sit and watch them, the cheapest ones are all right. You can probably get a friend to give you a few anyway.
If you get your fish in the breeding season, you will probably get a few gravid (pregnant) females anyway.
A word of warning: fish normalize their environment better than we do. A given amount of water will only hold a precise number of inches of fish. So, as an example, say that each ten gallons of water will suffice for ten inches of fish and you have 200 gallons that is 200 inches of fish, which is 20 x 10 inch fish or 40 x 5 inch fish. As the fish grow, they will die to maintain this ratio, so do not purchase too many until you are familiar with the ratio.
Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is at present involved with finding a koi pond contractor. If you are interested in a Solar Powered Pond Pump, please go to our web site now for some fantastic deals.
Article submitted Monday, June 20, 2011 & read 47 times.
Owen Jones writes on many subjects and is currently running several websites. He was born in Wales but now lives in northern, rural Thailand.
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