A week in the life of a koi farmer (wc 22_8)

A brief update for you on this one, as time is in short supply currently.  The good news is we're making good progress with the spawning and production season and that's so important for the running of the farm, as it drives fry we sell and also the small koi mixes which are coming online very soon.  In fact, we do have a 2-3 inch kohaku only mix available now , if that's of interest, please see https://www.byerkoifarm.co.uk/collections/small-koi

The heat waves have been tricky for us to navigate through, being unable to ship koi in the elevated temperatures.  So our holding systems have been bursting at the seams, particularly with fry.  And over the last week we have managed to get most of it out and also delivery the business as usual activity for this month.

All 3 of our kids have stepped in to help; whether it be counting fry or harvesting ponds.  And the end result is we are now starting to break through the most intense period of the season.  Phew!  However, we still find ourself with several days of work on each day's to do list.  So, we are still in the thick of it.

Our son helping with the really messy job of clearing out the last few fry from the drainage sink in the fry pond

The final spawnings for this year are scheduled to run this week.  More on those if they go well.  What I can reveal is the penultimate round of spawnings last week has delivered us 2 fry ponds worth of hatchlings which are now out in the fry ponds and these are a doitsu metallic mix - very popular the last time we ran it.  In the spawning, went Beni kikokuryu, Lemon Hariwake and Doitsu Ochiba.  The output should be fascinating !  Harvest due in around 4-5 weeks time.

And, here's a short clip of those doitsu metallic fry at just a few days old.

We are soon to announce our nisai harvest and nisai sales release dates.  And there may be some other sales news too... so , watch this space.

Other news - two of our customers won a great range of awards at the recent Crouch Valley Koi Show, including best Kohaku in the entire show!  There were also awards won with our Showa, Doitsu Metallics, Kujaku, Ogons, and several of our Kohaku.  That warrants it's own blog post!