Water Gardening: Would you guys like?, 1 by Carolyn22

Carolyn22 wrote:
Snapple/Backspace

Apparently the correct terminology is spawning rope http://www.koicarp.net/filtration/media/spawning_ropes.html. I remember seeing them for sale last year. I believe it was in the Spring - which would make sense. My DH and I are thinking that hopefully, the koi would use the spawning rope and that it is a matter of pulling these ropes out of the water before the fish hatch. All I know is that we were inundated with fry this past year and it was horrible to try to catch the fry to get them out of the pond - all the fish were terrified.

We first noticed the fry around May and then the second time was early July. I do know we were having clarity problems last year due to silt and we thought we would have noticed the fry sooner if there had not been having the clarity issues. This past year was the first year with the fry prolem.

Our pond is just under 5000 gallons. We started out with a 90 gallon Walmart pond, enlarged to 1100 gallons and then the year before this last, went to our current size. We don't have room to go any bigger as we are in town and our house is on 1/3 of an acre - so this is it. We have been ponding for a total of 6-7 years and only last year have we had the problems with the koi babies.

We have a friend that owns a Nursery and she sells regular things like petunias, etc - but she also sells pond plants, koi and she has her own pond. We took the fish to her last year and quite frankly - I didn't care whether she sold them or put them in her own pond - as long as they didn't die.

Next year we will have more koi that will be of breeding age - I am hoping the spawning ropes work!

Carolyn