APRILl 2002:

April to me is the time that the new Koi season begins; magazines are full of dealer’s ads describing technical innovations that will make our ponds wonderful and of course all the new fish are waiting to temp us.  

I have had a few pond problems this month; I have had an ongoing water clarity problem since February. I replaced the U.V. tubes during early March, but this has not helped.  The water appears to be a grey colour and I can only see down approx 2 feet.  During a visit to Dave Rice on Easter Saturday I asked him what he thought. Dave advised me to try F.O.C. (at least that’s what I think it was called as I transferred it to a water tight container and threw away the package!) Dave recommends this product as it breaks up blanket weed and removes harmful bacteria from the pond bottom. It also improves water clarity, but not in this case!  

As I have been working in Hemel Hempstead recently and went to see Barry and Carol Brown at Karobar Koi. I have known Barry for at least ten years and he has a wealth of experience in pond matters and even more so in koi health.  Barry holds a Koi clinic every Saturday and Sunday and I have seen queues of 20 people some mornings. If you are having problems, ulcers or parasites Barry will help you and he is not expensive compared to a Vet.  However if you intend to visit Barry with a koi health problem be there 9:00am sharp!

On this particular day Barry was not there and I spoke to Carol and she recommended a product called Superbugs, but also inquired whether I had cleaned the quartz tubes on my UV’s. Ouch no! I had not, so home I went, out came the quartz tubes and they were covered in scale!  As I’m sure you all know these tubes are very delicate and nervously I cleaned them in the bath, the quartz tubes that is!

However this does not have a happy ending as I then thought that the fish did not look right, our chagoi even looked like it was over producing mucus. A quick scrap and out with the trusty microscope and I found trichodina and treated the fish with malachite and formalin.  Now I have a nice blue pond!

Even this is not the end of the story. I have a Goshiki, which I brought two years ago from Geoff Kemp. While the fish was in temporary lodgings, during our house move in September 2000 (a 12,000 gallon heated pond) it picked up an injury around its left eye.  I thought that I cured the injury, but it never quite disappeared and this spring it has flared up again, so last week I drove down to Barry and he treated the fish for me, He also scraped the fish and found it infested with the dreaded trichodina only four days after I treated the pond.  Malachite and Formalin have never failed me before, Barry advised me that tricodina can be very difficult to eradicate and to treat the fish again with a higher dosage, which I have now done so.  I have also purchased Superbugs and I will let you know whether it works and how I used it next month.