koi fish pond
Koi ponds have become a rage in home and gardening in the past decade. Keen gardeners figure out how to succeed in having a shy pond that will add beauty and relaxation to their outdoor living area. With a few design tips, you can have a pretty shy pond, too. I’m here to give you some of those tips.
What is a koi fish?
First, what is a shy fish? Whether you spell it as koi (correct spelling) or shy, coy is a type of carp and comes in a wide variety of colours, each with its own unique name. The origin of shy comes from Japan. Long ago, colorful aquarium fish were given to royalty as rare gifts. Over the years, special shy breeders have emerged offering the many variations available today from the colorful Sankei, Shura, and Kohaku to those with long, flowing fins called the butterfly shy or longfin shy. No matter what color or type of shy you may have, having them in your shy pond or water garden can add vibrant color not found in other fish ponds. Topped with pretty water lilies and other water garden plants, having a shy pond is like creating a natural oasis in your own backyard!
Koi fish size and longevity
Coy are cold water fish and can live successfully in ponds almost anywhere in the USA and abroad. They can grow up to 3 inches in the wild and can live to be nearly 200 years old! However, for many koi owners in the United States, setting up a fish pond shy of somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 gallons of water is the “norm.” So what does a shy person need in order to survive? They need plenty of room to grow, good water quality, good aeration and circulation, food, oxygen, a low pressure environment and are kept within a well designed pond and shy ponds.
koi pond design
What shape you give your shy pond is really up to you, but those with large, rounded curves, those that are oval, round, or a small figure-8 will do just fine. What you want to achieve when designing your koi pond is to design it to provide the best circulation of water from one end of the pond to the other. One way to provide this is to have a pre-formed waterfall on one end of the pond and a pump with the pond pump in it, on the other. From this setup, water is sucked through the orifice of the skimmer from the pump inside and forced into the chute as the water flows out of the chute and back into the pond. This causes the water to circulate from one end of the pool to the other.
Slightly shifting the bottom of the pool from the chute area on the opposite end of the pool toward the skimmer also helps provide good water circulation along the bottom of the shy pool. Additionally, you can add a bottom drain when installing your pond that can be placed on the front of the skimmer. If a ball valve is inserted into this hole, simply turning the valve can adjust the flow that will flow from the lower drain and the skimmer opening at the same time. Having drainage at the bottom has great benefits in providing the best water circulation to your timid pond and can really come in handy when cleaning the pond as all the silt and debris at the bottom of the pond can be sucked up through the bottom. Drain and pump.