A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF A KOI FARMER (WC 21_4_25)

It's been a while since my last post in the "Week in the Life of a Koi Farmer" series, largely because the last couple of weeks have been incredibly busy. In fact, this entire month has flown by with a whirlwind of activity!

Koi Selection and Sales Room Update

The success of our 2024 spawnings has been nothing short of fantastic, delivering what is possibly our best selection of koi bred here at Byer Koi Farm. Combined with koi I hand-selected during my recent trips to Japan, our sales room now has an extensive range of koi, catering to a variety of tastes and budgets.

As usual, it’s just myself and Amanda running the farm and the shop, so over the last three months, we’ve focused on completing the tosai (young koi) growing cycle, filling the sales room with koi, cataloguing, and handling all the online releases you've seen in February, March, and April.

Spawning Preparations for This Year

In the background, we’ve also been busy preparing our brood fish for this year’s spawnings. Over the next two weeks, we’ll be prioritising this work to ensure we deliver another excellent set of spawnings this season.

We also have another wave of tosai to bring into the sales room, including Shusui from our new Maruhiro Shusui female, as well as Ki Utsuri and Karashigoi from Maruhiro parents. These koi, from our late 2024 spawnings, are now ready to join the sales room. We’ll be working on getting that done alongside our high-priority spawning preparations.

Here's a sneaky peak on the main Shusui pond being prepared for harvest:

We have a similar pond, with Karashigoi.  And another pond with Ki Utsuri.

I expect the harvest will deliver new stock into our 6-8 inch mix, and also individual koi at £75 and possibly some at £125 too.

We also have another pond of Doitsu metallics, which has our main harvest of Doitsu Kogane Ochiba.  Plus one more pond of Doitsu non-metallic, which has most of our Aragoke types.

So, plenty more to look forward to from our own BKF koi.  And in terms of Japanese imports, we have just brought through to the sales room most of the koi I selected on my recent trip to Japan that have completed quarantine .  Many of these still need to be catalogued and listed online, but in advance of that - they are available in the sales room to view and buy. You can see some of the range, here https://www.byerkoifarm.co.uk/blogs/blog/easter-weekend-koi-drop-stunning-new-koi-in-stock

Behind the Scenes at BKF

Behind the scenes, we’re also moving the remaining stock out of our growing-on systems and transferring our ake nisai (koi we’ll grow to nisai) into their new summer growing ponds. At the same time, we’re clearing down other ponds to make space for fry.

This year, in a slight departure from previous years, we’ve made available some of our top-quality tosai—normally released only at nisai—for sale. It’s been interesting for us to see the demand for this level of tosai, and we’re considering doing more of this in the future. My current thinking is to make these koi available for sale for around one month, giving you plenty of time to assess and order. Any that remain will then be moved into our growing-on ponds for the summer.

To view the current range of these high-quality tosai, please visit the following link:
https://www.byerkoifarm.co.uk/collections/koi-for-sale?filter.p.m.my_fields.date_spawned=2024&filter.v.price.gte=150.00&filter.v.price.lte=995.00

Spawnings wise, we will talk more about these in around a week's time.  One of the big question unanswered questions we have is whether any of the Dianichi nisai Kohaku and Showa that we bought in the autumn to use as brood stock (https://www.byerkoifarm.co.uk/blogs/blog/high-stakes-koi-acquisitions-byer-koi-farm-secures-elite-dainichi-kohaku-and-showa-females-to-strengthen-our-bloodlines) deliver some eggs for us this spring.  They are being fed the koi equivalent of a steak diet in the hope it helps them along, and they are all well settled into the females tank now.  We're keeping everything crossed that we get some product there.  Irrespective of how they get on, our range of brood stock has never been better and this is probably one of my favourite times of the year as we gear up to producing new koi!

Final Thoughts and Thank You's

It’s been wonderful to see so many people visiting our shop, learning about our extensive range of koi, and discovering the services we offer. Some hadn’t seen our blogs or the customer pond stories I wrote over the winter, which are a great read if you haven’t checked them out already. I highly recommend having a look:

https://www.byerkoifarm.co.uk/pages/customer-koi-pond-stories

Also, a huge thank you to everyone who visited over the tosai selections day (https://www.byerkoifarm.co.uk/blogs/blog/we-re-open-as-normal-this-weekend-but-with-something-extra-special), and Easter weekend.

On the tosai release day and a couple of days this Easter weekend - Amanda and I were at full stretch, meeting a record number of customers. Thank you for your patience, and it was a pleasure to meet both returning and new customers. Helping you fulfil your koi hobby aspirations is something we genuinely enjoy, and we appreciate your support in making it all possible.

It's been wonderful for us to see so many returning customers, and also meet lots of new customers who are only now finding us.  Helping you to fulfil your koi hobby aspirations and dreams is extremely important to us, and an enjoyable part of our work.  Thank you all, for your interest in our koi and services, and also for your support.