This article was first written for and published by Koi Carp Magazine in 2009

Just like in Japan, we have mud ponds which we use to grow our fish in over the summer months.  Some of our mud ponds are used just for fry in their first season but two of them are used for growing on the small percentage of Koi that we feel are of a high enough quality for us to continue growing them for another season or more.

We produce over half a million fry to one inch each year and each of those fry are harvested and selected through several times within the first few months of their lives resulting in just 2,000 of them being chosen to go into our indoor growing on facility over the winter.  This 2,000 will be reduced by half at the beginning of the following year and from the 1,000 remaining, around 600 will be chosen to be grown on for a second summer in one of our growing on ponds.  For us to keep a Koi for that length of time it has to be something quite special but there are plenty of fish which go into our sales tanks simply because we don’t have room to grow them all on – it’s a tough choice but one that we have to make at every stage of selection.  Our last mud pond is for growing on the very few Koi that we choose to grow on for a third summer, and on rare occasions a fourth or fifth summer, and in 2009 we chose just 50 fish to go into this pond.

In May 2009 at our annual Koi Quest Day that we hold for members of the internet chat forum “Koi Quest”, we allowed some of our customers who bought fish from us on that day, to put back into the mud pond the Koi that they had just bought.  Those customers were then invited to the harvest day in mid September to see their Koi emerging from the pond after a long summer and to see what if any improvement their fish had undergone in that time.  It’s an interesting exercise for us because looking after your own fish is one thing but looking after fish that belong to someone else is another thing entirely and we feel an added sense of responsibility.  There are always amongst these Koi some which quite frankly could have gone either into a sales tank or back into the mud pond for a further season and so it’s a chance for us to see if we made the right decision when we decided to sell them in the Spring!

Three of the fish that went back into the mud pond for the summer were featured in the article about the Koi Quest Day that appeared in Koi Carp Magazine earlier in 2009.

Sanke 52cm: Chris Penn	Sanke 49cm: Eric Littlewood	Shiro Utsuri 39cm: Andy Humphreys

On 14^th September we harvested both of our growing on ponds with around 20 customers looking on – all of them waiting to see what had happened to the fish that they had bought from us back in May. Before we harvested the pond with their fish in however we also had to harvest our Nisai!  There was no shortage of willing helpers fortunately and once this was done, and with a stop for lunch, we moved on to the pond everyone had been waiting for which contained the fish they had bought from us earlier in the year. Once again the guys pitched in to help with the harvest and one by one their Koi and ours emerged from the water.

We were very lucky to have the company of quite a few friends (including Mark Griffiths, Myles Sharman, Bob Hart, Chris Gabay and Andy Humphreys) most of whom have helped us harvest our ponds over the years, and with their experienced hands we were able to smoothly and carefully transfer all of the Koi safely from the mud pond.  The process involved Mark lifting each Koi by hand from the water and into a floating paddling pool with clean water in it, before putting each Koi into a plastic bag.  The bag was then lifted away from the pond and the Koi transferred into to a clean bowl of water next to the transport tank.  Myles then had the job of lifting each Koi by hand from the bowl and into the transport tank itself.  Once full, the transport tank was then taken as close as possible to the indoor tanks and each Koi was transferred into a plastic bag once again and lifted into the waiting tank.