Articles

This article is in fact a Q&A with Mark regarding breeding 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.

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 ma...

A Shiro Utsuri bred by Cuttlebrook Koi Farm, and owned by Martin Barnett,  was awarded the major prize of Baby Champion at the BKKS National in 2010.  Rather fittingly, we had also been asked to write an article on Koi breeding for the show magazine that year too, so a pret...

Make sure you have both males and females in your pond!  It may seem obvious, but some Koi keepers, either by accident or design, end up with Koi of only one sex in their pond.  Male Koi tend to be slim with larger pectoral fins than the females and they also have rough cheeks.

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).

5th 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 5th May this year was Kohaku and w...

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 h...

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 ...

The closest thing to breeding Koi would be breeding table or angling carp although the methods used for commercial carp breeding are not the same as those used for breeding Koi.

When Mark lived in Japan he worked on Yamazaki Koi Farm which was at the time the largest Koi Farm in the country and located in the south of the country. After many years of farming Koi in the UK, he decided that the time was right to return to Japan and to visit the north, s...