Birthday treat

My birthday falls today, but I treated myself to an early birthday party in the form of a shipment of fish from Rain Garden Ornamentals on Oahu. Steve produces fantastic fish – receiving them straight from the breeder has a special jolt. I shared the parcel with Lin DiRenzo, a ponder from South Jersey, who drove over to pick them up.

These two “big” guys, a 7″ wakin and a 4″ watonai went into the new Rubbermaid pond with the other alpha fish:

They swam about, schooling with the rest of the goldies and fighting for food, almost immediately.

The other fish were smaller, all in the 2 to 2½” range, two wakins and three jikins. They seemed a little less energetic than the big ones, preferring to hide on the bottom and not eat. That all changed in a day or two; they are eating now and swimming, though they still are not as zippy as I would like. They tend to cluster around one of the two watonai, like goslings behind a goose.

Here they are in a more adventurous mood:

I have put pictures of the new boys and girls in the section labelled “My Troubling.”

Bumpkin or Lothario?

Bumpkin was chasing Sparky earlier in the week, but I caught him pursuing Flash yesterday. Sparks seems relieved that his attentions are elsewhere.

Flash has been holding her tail better the last couple of days. I hope that Bumpkin’s harassment will not stress her out so much that she starts drooping again:

A discovery

Out in the rural end of Montgomery County PA, I found an unusual business – a combination pond/water gardening store with a fishing pond open to the public. Center Point Pond offers fishing for a fee, great for families, as well as a fully stocked pond store, a greenhouse with plants and fish, and two display ponds.

The fishing pond:

Starting them young:

Two display ponds full of koi:

A nice pond store, where I bought some gloves and a floating plant protection gizmo. I also learned that one could improvise a pump sock with a basket and some foam.

Their fish look great as well (see the koi below) .I saw some nice shubs that I might get to finish off my pond, after the new Hawai’ian fish have acclimated.

Visit their website at Center Point Pond and definitely visit them in person if you ever find yourself in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Horny, horny fishies

Sparky is a female, and Bumpkin is apparently the only male in the back pond.

When I looked out the bathroom window, I saw Sparky laying in the marginal flower pot. My thought was, “Oh, no, not a dead one!”

When I went to check it out, I found Sparks racing around the pond with a Shubunkin attached to her tail. It’s mating season. He followed her everywhere, poking at her midsection, even when she slid sideways into the bog plant basket.

By this afternoon, the eggs must have been dispatched, as she was a bit slimmer, and Bumpkin no longer followed her about. I don’t see eggs anywhere; they could have been eaten, or she could have deposited them in the flower bed.

AAARGH! Curiosity kills the fish.

I went out to give my fishies a morning feeding and found Dom stuck in the pump intake of the new pond. Unfortunately, his attempt to ferret out a little algae or uneaten food cost him his life, as he got caught in the plastic grid. It took some effort to extract him.

The pump in my original pond was in a filter box, so this couldn’t have happened there. The new pond has an external filter with a submerged pump, so the intake can be approached by the fish. I need to get a sock or enclosure to ensure that one of my other small fish does not meet the same fate.

Spring has sprung

The fish have been swimming like demons today, as the air temperature surged into the 70s and the water temperature to the high 60s. Between the algae and the sun, their colors are on full display.

Flash lives up to her name, darting about the pond. I hope all the exercise and food will cause her tail fin to become more horizontal, as a watonai’s should. I thought she had the curse of the good-looking (laziness and vanity) but she has perked up in the last two weeks!

There is nothing amiss in Ginger’s form, however. That’s as healthy a wakin as I have ever seen. No bumps, and all fins intact and properly deployed.

Water gardening the fishproof way

I attended an informative seminar at Aquatic Connections on planting the pond. It included everything from making bogs to dividing lilies. Last year my small pond featured some lilies, with water hyacinth as a surface plant. Despite full sun, nothing bloomed. The fish gnawed the water hyacinth roots raw, and the lilies did not even send up any buds. This year I will plant marginals to supplement the other plants. I have two little shelves, so I put some new plants from AC in them and created mini-bogs. The surface of the water is about half an inch above the lips of the baskets, so naturally my fish tried swimming sideways to get at the plants, but to no purpose. I covered the crowns with pebbles to discourage them in any case.

The large pond has no shelves, so I went with a floating planter. It has a mix of terrestrial and aquatic plants. I had a devil of a time getting it planted. I decided to do it in the pond so that I would not overload it and make it sink, but I made a mess, dumping dirt and gravel into my pond and giving myself a cleanup chore. I am not sure it is “seaworthy” even now. I hope it can survive wind and storms without capsizing. I have had to anchor it to keep it from drifting under the falls.

The Rubbermaid has predrilled holes, so I used zip ties to attach a kidney planter filled with pea gravel to the sunny edge of the tub to hold more marginals:

I finished it off with a lily, whose leaves should reach the surface soon:

First feeding

The water temperature has crossed 60F for two days in a row, and has been above 50 for a week, so spring feeding with wheat germ and cheerios can commence.

I put the food in the water last evening and it took a minute for them to find it. Ginger and Cal located it first, then the others followed.

Flash was beginning to worry me. Despite the warming temperatures, she continued to sit on the bottom almost all the time, darting about for a few seconds every half hour or so. The feeding changed that. Ahe pigged out, then began to school and swim with the other fish. A couple of hours later, she was still active.

Here is the troubling without Flash:

Here are some with Flash awake and in action:

Nice display!

The red-eyed exploration mode.

Reconnecting with old friends.

Having a grand old time!

New “Pond”

Last Monday, I installed a new 300 gallon Rubbermaid watering tank to serve as my new pond.

The tank is enormous, so I borrowed a friend’s van (not a mini-van, which could not have held it) to make the trek out to the nearest farm supply store, some 20 miles outside the city. The trip started badly, as I am not accustomed to driving huge vehicles, and a protruding piece of cement managed to break a window of the van as I navigated it out of the parking deck. When I heard the scrunch of breaking glass, I was sure I had thousands of dollars of damage to the van, but somehow, the concrete beam managed to break the window without touching the body! The price of my pond did increase by $147, though.

The farm supply store was so close to the Jersey shore that I could see sand dunes and (ecch!) herons. We had to force the tank into the back of the van, but at that point I was not about to give in. Back in Philly, with some effort we managed to get the wedged tank out of the van and into my back yard.

It took five hours to fill the tank using my hose mounted dechlorinator. I loaded the filter with innoculated media, started it, and let it run overnight to fully aerate the water. The next day, I added some bacteria and two fish to start the cycling. I used Pumpkin, who just graduated from the hospital tank and Dom. One medium and one small fish in 300 gallons should be just right to get the filter up and running. I will add the other two small shubbies one at a time over the next couple of weeks.

With no (living) plants and no algae coat, the new tank looks pretty barren at present:

I plan to insulate it and build a masonry enclosure before next winter. Plant shelves (plastic stools) and plants are the next order of business as soon as the aquatic nurseries start putting them out. Floating plants won’t be available for several weeks, as we have to be beyond the last frost, normally the third week of April.

I have put one of my overwintering lilies from the old pond in the new tank, as the algae on its pot acts as a food source for the two shubs, who have been munching and pooping according to plan :

They seem to love the new digs. With far more room to swim, and a much swifter water current from the powerful pump, the bigger habitat will doubtless produce bigger, healthier fish. I will probably keep the watonai and some smaller fish in back pond, while concentrating on bigger, more athletic fish for the new one. (No house or a tree branch in my pond, just reflections.)

The countdown has begun to the shipment of fish from Hawaii in late April!!!

Spring Cleaning, or From Muck to Murk

After months of having to do very little except add bacteria to the established back pond, the time has come to get my hands wet again!

Today’s cleaning regimen included:

1. Rinsing out the filter box. I don’t know how the pump continued to run with all that garbage around it. The coarse and fine mechanical foam layers were thick with algae, and the inlet screen required a thorough scrub down. There were even some unidentified plants sprouting in there! A quick swish of the biological material and a little innoculent completed the spring tuneup.

2. Cleaning the bottom. Absolutely disgusting. I scraped the bottom with a net and brought up four months’ worth of fish crap, algae, and dead leaves. Amazingly, the fish knew that the net was not for them and did not panic. I left the algae growth on the sides so the fish would have something to munch. Today was the first day that the water temperature topped 60F, so I won’t restart feeding them prepared food for a little while yet.

3. Changing the water. Biological activity is on the rise, and the water is approaching the temperature where ammonia and nitrite can be a problem as the filter re-establishes itself, so I did a 25% change-out. With the new water and the green water, the energy of the fish surged.

I stirred everything up , so the water turned pea green. It should clear up in a couple of days. Next weekend, I will clean the bottom again, as well as the filter, which should have caught all the garbage that escaped my net. I will also tend my overwintered plants at that point.

Here’s what it looks like. One can barely see the fish though the murk.