Midsummer plant frenzy

The plants in the big pond have suddenly taken off, that is the ones that were thriving anyway. That would include the plantain, the sneezewort, the “fiber optic” plant, parrot’s feather, and especially the cardinal flower, which is over three feet tall.

A handful of plants from humble beginnings have taken over the pond!

A view of my yard with both ponds at dusk.

The cardinal is starting to put out tiny flowers. It will be spectacular when it fully erupts.

Now, if only I could get those lilies blooming!

Looks like she made it

Three weeks after Pumpkin leaped out of the pond, she has recovered to the point where her behavior matches where it was before the jump.

Her color has not reached the richness it had before the jump, and the scales on one side are still healing, but the only big difference in her appearance is the caudal (tail) fin, most of which fell off. She had magnificent fins before the the escapade, so the stubby tail takes some getting used to. The shortened tail looks healthy, with no signs of infection, ragged edges, or rot. In fact, it looks like the normal tail of a hiibuna (common) goldfish.

She eats, swims with the other fish, and never isolates herself, so I think her systems have recovered.

Does anyone with experience know whether the tail will grow back?

The pleasures of a pond at twilight

One of my favorite times to visit the pond is right at sundown, when the colors are intense, the fish are comfy, and the lights are beginning to come on.

What a week! Injury! Rescue!

I can tell you one thing about keeping fish: the adventures never stop.

Monday, I saw a swollen lump on Harley, my white dominate wakin. I prepared a quarantine bucket so that I could examine him. I feared he was manifesting the dreaded wakin cancer. After posting pictures on the web, a diagnosis of impacted scale or scrape emerged, so I kept him in isolation and treated with Melafix. One can treat wounds in the pond, but why treat the whole pond with that expensive elixir when merely dosing a bucket will save lots of $$. Happily, the swelling is down and the wound almost gone in three days.

Bumpkin’s predicament proved worse. I got up early to put out the trash, and I was glad I did. I found my beautiful Bumpkin lying motionless on the patio bricks! A second jumper in a month.

Fortunately, she was still breathing, so I tossed her back in the pond. I had heard that cyprinids could survive outside water, sometimes for hours. In fact, that is how koi cultivation started; workers in Japanese rice paddies smuggled the mutated, more colorful carp home in their pockets.

She lay on her side on the surface for a few moments, breathing heavily. I tried to clean as much dirt as possible off her with my finger. After about ten minutes, she righted herself and started swimming normally albeit slowly. She has spent the morning swimming slowly about, mostly hanging by herself. The only visible ill effects of the out-of-pond experience are clamped dorsal and anal fins, and a dull appearance due to the erosion of the slime coat.

There was no thunderstorm or other loud noise that I know of, and the water tests clean, so I guess I need to devise a strategy to block my fish from jumping out.

UPDATE: As of nightfall, Bumpkin is still alive, but she has taken to bottom-sitting. She moves every few minutes and responds to stimuli, but she isn’t eating or swimming long distances. I hope she recovers from her trauma.

UPDATE 6/15: Bumpkin is beginning to swim slowly from place to place. There still seems to be some stringy mess attached to her. I might try to give her a cleaning soon if it doesn’t fall off.

UPDATE 6/16: She is swimming more and has resumed eating. She rests a lot, but nearer the surface, not on the bottom. Her tail fin has rotted from a comet shape to a short tail like a common. The other fins are okay, though the anal fins are clamped.

Back from LA to a mini-crisis

I returned from my trip to Book Expo America to find my fish thriving, but the pump in the back pond malfunctioning. The flow barely made a trickle, and the water reeked. I asked my neighbor, who dutifully fed the fish in my absence, when it had quit, and he said it had slowed down the last couple of days.

I quickly installed my backup pump, cleaned the filter and pond bottom, and performed a 20% water change. There seem to be no ill effects of the slowdown – thank god I had a healthy complement of plants!

All the fish and plants seem to be thriving as spring trends into summer – we will have temperatures in the 90s this weekend. Oddly, even though I am enjoying my second water lily bloom, the first land lily bloomed today.  The new Hawai’ian fish have grown quickly as well.

Blooms? Blooms!

My irises are blooming! I have never had much luck with terrestrial plants, and last year’s aquatics did not yield a single flower, but this year has yielded two lily blooms and three iris flowers already in the back pond, and the plants in the big pond are thriving as well.

Best of all, the fish are loving all the lily leaves, which cover half the small pond.

A visit with old friends

I stopped by Kathy and Phil’s house on my way to Lancaster for That Fish Place’s annual pond sale, which was a bit of a disappointment. I have always been impressed with their enormous store and its amazing array of pond gear, treatments, and food at great prices, but their livestock and plants proved underwhelming. I had never visited the store “in season” before. The selection of pond fish didn’t impress, and I have seen much better plants at better prices at Aquatic Connections and Fins Feathers. The half hour wait to be served in the livestock department was, I hope, not an everyday trend.

Kathy and Phil’s pond never fails to impress, however. It features a cascading waterfall, and they do not cull their fish, leading to a wide variety. My four koi and all of their goldfish overwintered nicely.

I took some pictures:

Lovely setting, eh? This spring has the emerald green look of England or Ireland.

What a waterfall!

Great variety of fish. Plain comets, sarassas, albinos, commons, and mottled mutts.

Spino (orange ogon) and Redchel (aka bekko) feel right at home in the nice clear water.

Marble (black and white butterfly), with Redchel, getting into the action.

Great to see them again happy and healthy!

Flora

Here are the pictures of my plants, which have largely settled in well this season. A beautiful spring day will perhaps help take my mind off losing Bumpkin.

From the big pond:

The lobelia has started well.

The bog weeds are going to town.

This fiber optic plant looks cool bursting out of the floater!

The back pond occupies a flower bed, so it serves as garden and fish pond:

It features a big assortment of plants from parrot’s feather in the waterfall to a lily on the bottom.

Healthy plants make happy fish!

The blue rush, marsh marigolds, bloody dock, and irises make a nice transition to the lilies, sedge, and shrubs in my terrestrial garden.

Oh, no!!!!!!!

My most prized fish, Bumpkin, a magnificent midnight blue shubunkin, jumped out of my pond and succumbed. He dated back to my starter pond.

I noticed he was not in the pond while reviewing photographs of my newest fish, Harley. The normally sociable Bumpkin did not appear in a single shot. I went out in the dark and searched with a flashlight but could not find him.

This morning, I looked again to no avail and then moved all the trash cans and furniture near the tank. I located the corpse against the fence behind the roll of solar cover. No predator bites, just a whole fish covered in mud.

Bumpkin leapt quite a bit when he was young, but never managed to vault out of a small 125 gallon pond. I hadn’t ever seen him break the surface in the new pond.

RIP

A happy troubling

I returned from sales conferences in New York to find that my fish and plants were thriving. I will post pictures of the flora later, when the sun comes out again, but here are shots of the fauna swimming happily together, new and old: