When Do We Start Feeding The Fish Again?
Julia in Perry Township “I have some questions about our fish. Is it too early to start feeding them?
That is a great question. So we have thermometers, and they’re not very expensive. You put them down in the water once the water temperature hits 50 degrees, then it’s okay to start feeding the fish. But remember they haven’t eaten all winter, so you don’t want to start feeding them every day. When you do start to feed them, you want to work them into it slowly.
So maybe once the first week, maybe twice the second week, three times the week after. You can get to a point where you’re feeding them every day, but you don’t want to start feeding every day right off the bat. And sometime here in April is when the water temps are gonna hit 50 degrees.
We did start our ponds up last week. I would also recommend when you start your ponds up let them run for 24 to 48 hours before you do anything. You want to get good oxygen back in the water, let the filter system clean that water before you start putting fish food or algae side or anything like that in the water column.
I do have some people that run them through the winter, and this year lost all their koi.
So what happens when we have a mild winter, running the pond through the winter would be okay, but when we have a really nasty cold one like the one we just had, the water mother nature is trying to keep that water temperature 50 degrees and we’re pumping that warm water up and pumping down, you know 10 degree air, and so as it enters back into the pond itt super cools the entire pond and that can freeze the fish out.
Which is one of the reasons we recommend shutting the pumps down in the fall around Thanksgiving and just putting an aerator in the pond. The aerator will just create oxygen in there so the fish can breathe through the winter, but allows the temperature of the pond to stay much warmer because you’re not pumping that water down the cold waterfalls or up through a fountainhead.
The heaters are designed to keep an opening in the ice, not to heat the entire volume of water in the pond. And again, most years you’ll probably be okay. But we never know in Ohio what kind of winter we’re gonna see and we saw a pretty bad one this year. So I’m just noting this for the people in the future.
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