Your greatest priority as a koi keeper should always be the health of the Koi in your pond, whether they are pets or prize winners and regardless of how much you might have paid for them, but once you feel you have provided the best environment for your koi to flourish, you may feel that you wish to learn about the other issues that arise when keeping Koi.

5^th May is “Boys’ Day” in Japan and it is also the time when traditionally, the Koi spawning season starts.  This is a tradition which we have also followed most years and this year was no exception.  One of the parent sets that we spawned on 5^th May this year was Kohaku and we used a female from Hoshikin and two males that we bred ourselves and which came from a Momotaro and Matsunoske cross that we did a few years ago.

Breeding Koi is as much an art form as it is a science and so to do it successfully you must grasp the basic scientific principles behind the elements that make a good fish farm and combine that with the art of Nishikigoi (the highest quality Koi).

This article is infact a Q&A with Mark regarding the breeding of koi, how he found himself to become a koi breeder and much more. It gives an interesting insight into the farm and the passion that Mark has to make Cuttlebrook Koi Farm the number one UK koi farm.

When people see images of mud ponds being harvested in the autumn it is invariably nisai (koi in their second year of life) and older that are being lifted from the pond. At this time of year however it is also time for the tosai, or koi in their first year of life, to be harvested.