This Section Is For Advanced Hobbyists Discussing new original cutting edge Experimental and Trial Treatments and Surgical Techniques, here we take koi health and pond keeping to the next level
I cooked the haddock for 20mins, allowed to cool and then mixed with the prawns and blended them to a mush. Added 1/4 the Fish Stock, Honey and Glucose and mixed them up evenly.
Crushed the Pellets and Silkworm into a fine powder and then mixed the two till I got a smooth paste which was easily manageable by hand to break into bits without it being sticky or too dry.
Plan is to feed it as a weekly treat by combining to 4 foods I have access to this season. The Takazumi pellets will from the basis of my feeding with the two paste foods being a one feed a week treat along with one feed a week of silkworm pupae.
Hi Greg
I know kevin Ellis makes his own food,what do you think it will add to your koi that there not already getting from the pellets and the green blaze on the pond walls and floor?also silkworm pellets gave my koi the runs,
When we had dogs there not like humans who like something a bit different,anything othere than there dry food seemed to upset there stomachs,just my thoughts.
I have thought for a while about trying to make something like this but not to sure about what to put in it, so I am sorry but I have a few question's
1) What made you use Haddock and why
2) Why have you still used wheatgerm as a basis
3) I take it that you feel this is ok to freeze, how long do you feel it will keep well for in the freezer
4) Why glucose
5) Do you think it would be a good idea to use say a garlic paste
6) What about adding a Vitamin C
Having read quite a bit about what Koi are meant to eat and what they actually eat, wheatgerm is not what they would eat in the wild fishmeal is not what they would eat in the wild, and what we can't replicate in their pellets we can suppliment with garlic and added vitamin C, There are also addatives you can buy to enhance colours and health.
I hope you don't mind me asking all this but and I say well done for making your own
My simple thought process behind it was that i will be feeding a mainly pellet diet but i like the paste concept and have sampled various ones to little effect in the past. Currently i have a new paste food to trial made by a company called Shinji. This consists of a "Kleur" (Colour) and a growth element to it. You mix the two 50/50 and feed it.
It was getting this to try and coupled with knowing Kevin Ellis that prompted me to try making a small batch of my own paste. This is based upon a recipe given to me by a hobbyist in Singapore who is a huge customer of SFF. He tells me they feed a version of this to the koi on the farm but instead of Haddock they use Oysters. I could find Oysters in my local supermarkets so i took my basic knowledge of the Hikari food range and their insistence on using high quality white fish as the protein ingredient and the prawns were added as a slight colour supplement (in theory) due to the natural carotene they contain.
Reason for the wheat germ pellets was that i needed a base for the food and a dry element to bind the wet side of the food with. I used a good quality wheatgerm which contains very little wheatflour and mainly the "germ" part meaning i get the maximum digestibility from my carrier item. Plus you need to balance foods to contain certain things and they need a carbohydrate element to enable the koi to break down and digest the "proteins".
You can add all sorts of attractants to the food - garlic, OJ, etc but for this initial batch I wanted the plain old straight forward recipe to try. They seem to like it in the golf ball sized piece i tried although i was still at quite a cold temperature so didn't feed much. Once I'm consistently above 20deg C then they will get this as a once a week treat type feed.
As for freezing when i was given the recipe i was told this was fine.
As for taste the fish and that blend was OK but nothing we wouldn't eat anyway - pellets i have tried these and they are OK but the whole thing i chickened out - LOL.
Each one of those "balls" is approx 120grams - my thoughts are once a week at present. Then another meal once a week of the Shinji paste.
Giving me approx 4 or 5 x 250g feeds per day of the chosen pellets i use.
Then one of those replaced with a paste feed (Shinji)
Then another on another day replaced with my own paste
Important to remember the high protein content and the extra density of the food means to get the same effect you need to feed less of it or you could make the koi fat. So one ball a week and 9 x balls = 9 weeks worth of food there. Thought process is to say feed one paste midweek and the other at the weekend so they are evenly spread out and your not loading the filters / trashing the water quality.
