Things may be a bit quieter at this time of year but it doesn't mean that there's not still lots to do!

Since before Christmas Mark has been pollarding some of the larger willows that grow in our hedgerow and cutting back some of the trees around the settlement pond. I can't say that I enjoy seeing Mark up a tree wielding a chainsaw but he's very good at it!

Mark has also done a lot of work towards building a new brood fish tank in the second polytunnel, whilst at the same time raising the whole floor which should make accessing all the tanks that much easier. I don't have any pictures of that yet, but I'll take some soon.

Today we started sorting through the tosai. We did two tanks - one with smaller fish from our later spawnings, and the Koromo. The first tank is where the majority of the Kikusui are and we are really pleased with the way they are coming along. The colours are looking great which is particularly of interest to us considering that there is no natural light in our tosai house.

The koi in our hot houses are all growing well, now that they have settled in, and some of the tanks are starting to look quite full. We will be regrading and reselecting all of the koi in the tosai house which means that some of them will be moved to the sales tanks.

Our sales tanks are not heated which means that all of the koi that we choose not to grow on any further have to be moved into one tank and then cooled down before being sorted by size and then moved into the appropriate sales tanks. That's an awful lot of koi to get through

Hopefully we will get through another couple of tanks tomorrow.

Lisa