Koi are gone!

Unfortunately I have bad news: all of our koi are gone. We had a visit last week from what we believe were raccoons. They somehow got under the net, made a mess of the pond and ate all of the fish!

We'll have to get a stronger net and secure it better before we get more fish. I might combine that with our plan to lower the pond walls.

Oh well, at least we have some photos of the fish as a memory and hopefully the raccoons at least enjoyed their meal.

We also hope that there might be some eggs in the pond that hatch into baby koi; we'll see.

Garden - Back Pond

[This post is the first of a series that will showcase most parts of our garden.]

We have two ponds, one in front and one in back. The one in our backyard is the larger of the two. It also is the home to our koi.

Some overall photos of the pond and the surrounding plants.

As I mentioned there are a few koi in this pond. Two (the pink one and black one) are left over from the original koi that we became owners of after purchasing our house two summers ago. We lost a lot of the koi we had that winter (either via a predator or theft) and only found the two swimming around the following spring. It was devastating, as we had a few large koi that were probably worth a bit of money (hence the idea that they may have been stolen).

The two orange koi (with white markings) we just purchased yesterday and they seem to have acclimatized themselves to their new home and their pondmates well. :) Hard to make good photos with my camera - will try to make better ones and post those.

We should really name them, perhaps with Japanese names. My wife will have to help out with that. :)

The pond is setup with a pump inside the pond that pushes the water through a hose to a gravel filter (under the black cover) where the water percolates up through the gravel and out a pipe into the short streambed and then over the flat stone back into the pond as you can see in this photo. You can also see the rolled up net that we use to cover the pond against predators.

We had some problems in the spring with water quality - it was quite cloudy and one could hardly see the bottom (it is a deep pond, over 4 feet in the deepest section). We bought a water test kit (strips that you dip in the water and then check what colour the pads change to) and after a few tests, discovered that the ph level was too low. To fix that I added some baking soda (about a cup over the course of two days) to add some alkalinity and it did wonders to raise the ph level and clear the pond! It's important though not to add too much at once.

I also bought a few more water plants - this one is a Pontederia cordata (pickerelweed).

That's it for now on our pond. We plan to lower the stone wall around the pond to make it more natural-looking and make an easier-to-take-off net cover. In the the future we also plan to build a cedar deck that will replace the paved patio that is currently in front of the pond. We should then have a pond area that looks more Japanese-style than European. Just more money and time required. :)

Organic Islands Festival

Yesterday my wife and I went to the Organic Islands Festival. It was extremely interesting and we spent several hours there, looking at all the exhibits, trying free samples of organic food, getting free samples to take home and buying a few products.

Well worth going to! I will definitely go next year again.

I hope to soon post an update on our garden with photos.

First post. Welcome!

This is my first post, so I'll keep it short. I've setup this blog to share my love of gardening. I hope to post my experiences (good and bad) in gardening.

I'll be posting lots of photos too, again showcasing my successes but also my "failures" and how I have learnt from them.

So I hope to post something at least once a week at the beginning, increasing to a few times a week once I get used to this blogging thing.

So until the next post, happy gardening!