On June 16h, we bred our female kohaku, known as YURI

Yuri was bred to 3 males

Yesterday, while joyce and I were culling thru another batch of black fry from our showa female Sharon, Mat as going thru the first cull of Yuri’s babies.

Joyce was able to get a few pictures before she left yesterday of the kohaku and returned this morning to the second pond of kohaku that Mat was sorting thru, before they went back to the mud pond.

Thanks again Joyce for sharing your pictures..Joyce will be posting more about the kohaku on Koi-bito.com, so be sure to follow her threads of Mat’s culling!

Nothing peeping thru on this kohaku

Needless to say, the farm is almost unbearable this week with the current heat wave.

The guys have been coming in at break of dawn again this week to pull the mud ponds of the baby koi Mat needed to cull.

Joyce stopped by the farm a few mornings this week to take some pictures of the Ai Gromo and the Showa (that she helped with the first cull)

Joyce is posting some of her experience on Koi-bito, so take look at her post too..http://www.koi-bito.com/forum/main-forum/13370-heres-little-news-nkf.html

Culled  this week was Ai Gromo – bred  Jun 1st.

Kikokuryu were the next to be culled, bred the same day as the Ai Gromo..but Mat decided to cull thru the Showa babies from “Sharon, who he bred Jul 16th.

Although these koi are 2 weeks younger, they have already had a first cull (at 3 days old)..so they are of good size and  far fewer koi for the guys to deal with during  a hot week like this!

Thanks again Joyce for sharing the pictures!!

Here on the farm we are on a Tuesday-Friday culling schedule for the rest of the summer

Each morning the boys arrive in for 6am to get the first pull of the pond completed and most of the koi in to be sorted before the day begins to heat up.

As the koi are being sorted, we keep a count of how many koi are making it thru the the first cull

Here is Mike Frady helping keep count for Mat

Today Mat is finishing culling thru 1 of 2 ponds from our female Carolyn, our Gin Rin Sanke – Bred May 17th 2011

Mat culling the baby koi – the larger of the babies will remain in the greenhouse and the smaller ones will return to the mud for another growing cycle.

In addition to culling today, the guys were in early this morning to get 2 more sets of breeders

- Ochiba – the males looked big until the female went into the tank!

2. Kujaku

We will be open this Saturday 10-3pm

Today is the start of our culling season.

The first pond to be culled is 1 of 2 sanke ponds from Hermy

The pond was full of tadpoles.

 Instead of being able to scoop the small koi up and place them in the transport tank, the guys had to pick out each koi from the masses of tadpoles.  This turned the job of bring the koi out of the pond from a few hours to a full day job!

Today is day 42 from when these koi were placed in the mud pond

The koi are averaging 3-4inches

All the koi are brought into the greenhouse where Mat will do their first grading

Mat, looking at each individual koi, will select the koi he will raise on.

Using a grader, he will keep all koi 3+inches in the greenhouse for continue growing and all koi under 3 inches will return to the mud pond for another round of growing.

By taking the larger koi out of the mud pond, this will allow the smaller koi to have less competition for food and hopefully give us good results in size at the next cull.

3 more mud ponds that hold koi from our first spawnings are on the schedule for this week to be culled.

Thank you to Joyce, Amanda, Kavent, Hannah and Myra ( sorry Myra, i didn’t get a picture of you- next time!) for your help in culling the showa fry. We were impressed with the number of fry that came from this young female, but the ratio of black babies to white babies was maybe only 10%.  Even with all the help, it took 3 days to get thru all the fry.

Tomorrow we plan to continue breeding..Gin Rin Showa is next up. IF anyone wants to come out for the next showa culling next week, please let us know. We have a great time going thru all these babies!!

This week has flown by here at the farm.

Sunday, The MAKC hosted their annual meeting here at the farm. About thirty koi hobbyist gathered. They were given a special close look at and  talk on koi owned by some of the club members there that day as the fish headed to the mud ponds for the summer.

Tuesday – began our first day of culling showa. THANK YOU Joyce for the hours you spent culling showa.

To be sure we got all the fry out of the hatching tank, Mat had me in the tank scooping the fry out..

On Tuesday we also had a special guest. Mr. Tosia Sakai and his daughter Miwa were in town and stopped by the farm. Its always nice to have Mr. Sakai’s approval that we are moving in the right direction with our koi. Mr. Sakai found a few koi that really caught his eye, one of them is owned and the owner has been contacted with Mr. Sakai review on the koi.

Joyce and i got a special treat when Miwa offered to help us cull the showa!  This was fun since we use a different method of sorting the fry then her farm does..so Joyce got to show her the ropes!

The eggs from last weeks hatching began to hatch yesterday morning.

One of the parent sets from last week’s breeding  was showa. With showa, we only raise the black fry.  So, non like other varieties that get their first cull at 45 days, the showa fry will be culled tomorrow or wednesday, only a few days old, before heading to the mud pond.

If you would like to help with this first culling of the showa PLEASE feel free to come out to the farm! Please call or email to see if we are culling tomorrow or Wedesday..We being at 9am!!

Last week i posted that the guys were sorting thru the koi from the Ochiba spawning and posted a few bowl shots of the koi.

The guys did continue that day and get individual pictures of the koi, but will all the sanke that followed i haven’t had a chance to post the ochiba.

Here are some of the Ochiba, as can see we got alot of variety from this spawning.

James worked thru the afternoon photographing sanke.

You may notice the picture of the small koi are better then our usual photos. Small koi are very hard to get a nice, lined up and sharp picture. They move so quickly in the bowl, by the time you focus and click the koi has moved.  These little koi can make the job of photographing a frustrating and long process.

With so many high class tosai this year, we have ALOT of individual koi photographing to do. To over come the these problems and make the job much more effectient, we have purchased a much faster speed camara. Another special feature of our new camera is its resistence to moisture, you won’t believe the number of the have been ruined by being used for long periods of time in our greenhouses!

Here are some highlight from James photoing session yesterday