At 20°C your Koi can eat
until the sun goes down, and this why your filters are so important. Whether
you paid £4.99 or £400, Koi carp at 20°C are colourful wheelie
bins for food.
If you want big fish they need lots of food to attain
good growth rate and first class conditions 100% of the time. There are no sort
cuts to this. Your entire hobby is based on WATER CONDITION and nothing but the
best will do, or you will never see your fish grow and become pets because they
will not live long enough.
There's nothing better than a 20" Koi that
you bought at 8" two years ago, taking food from the palm of your hand and
knowing is all your own work - next best thing is sex!
Filters and
fish treatments Here we have a problem - one the one hand we don't
we don't want to kill the biomass that's keeping the fish healthy, on the other
we want to add treatment to aid our fishes recovery.
The pond water must
be your prime concern. If you kill your biomass off it will not restart like a
pump. It may take 6-8 weeks at above 18°C which totally defeats the object.
Don't just put air stones in your filter and turn them off, the biomass will
die. Filters need moving water all the time, so prior to treatment start the
bypass up first check it works OK. If the bypass has not been not used for many
weeks or months it may fail and its too late when treatment is in the pond.
Always do a large water change after treatment before restarting the
filters and don't feed for a minimum of 5 days.