Gelatin based food mix.
This is the latest recipe. So far it holds together
better in the water and forms a nice malleable dough. It freezes well, if it is
a bit sticky, when thawed, just dust it with a bit of seaweed flour.
For 1 Kg (approx)
600g fish paste
150g seaweed flour
40g clay
100g egg white powder. (aka albumin in the UK from carp bait sellers e.g. http://www.ccmoore.com/
£8 a kilo.)
6 Vit B complex pills
1/2 teaspoon of vit C powder
Two cloves of garlic.
The paste is easier now. You need a mincer/grinder tho, not a blender.
I cook up the herring or mackerel with no water, allow to cool and add an equal
weight of prawn heads, put it thru the mincer and mix together. Gives a lovely
thick paste. Bag it into 600g amounts and freeze. Obviously the base paste can
be made in fairly large amounts if you wish. 5 kilos of herring plus 5 kilos of
prawn heads will give enough paste to make 16 kilos of food.
On the day, take 600g of the thawed fish paste, and stir in 100g of egg white
powder until it goes to a sticky paste.
Mix in six crushed vit B tabs and 1/4 teaspoon Vit C powder, followed by 25 ccs
oil (cod-liver and safflower/sunflower 50:50 plus a bit of wheat germ oil if you
like).
Then stir in 40g Refresh clay, and when that is mixed weigh out 150g seaweed
flour. Add the flour and knead well to make a dough. Don't use all the seaweed
flour if you don't need it, as too much will make the paste too dry and crumbly.
Also feed some fresh veg like squash, sweet potatoes etc and some live food,
prawn tails and mussels. For squash or pumpkin, I skin it and cube it into
suitable sizes, drop it into boiling water , bring to the boil and simmer for
about 3 - 4 minutes, less for small cubes, more for big. I then put it
immediately into cold water to stop it cooking. I don't bother skinning sweet
potatoes.
Crab/fish sticks are a good additive to cut up and feed. Nighttimes when it is
wet out, I go out with a bucket with a perforated lid, collecting snails. Put
enough crushed dry cardboard in fro them to sit on, and in a good day you can
get enough for the fish for two or three days. Crush them so the shell shatters
and throw them in whole.
You must be very careful not to harvest snails in areas where slug pellets are
used. Small slugs are fine, but the big ones are a bit tough.
This is not just a recipe, but also goes
into the whys and wherefores of feeding.
The amounts and ingredients are totally
variable, and can be adapted to what you
have available. All the information,
while as accurate as possible will not all
apply to every pond, and common sense
should be used in interpreting it.
The recipe is the way it is for a lot of
reasons. It started off quite
simply, and then like Topsy, it grew.
It has had a lot of the corners knocked
off by now, simply thru me trying it and
correcting mistakes a bit at a time over
the last few years. Usually what
happens is that the first thing people say
is "I won't bother with that, this
isn't necessary, and these would be
better." They then mail me and
say they are having problems with the
recipe. It clouds the water really
badly, won't stay together, causes this
problem or that and so on ad infinitum.
What I would suggest is that no matter how
stupid, unnecessary or silly you think
some details are, make one batch exactly
as I say. After that by all means
experiment, and if you find something that
works better, please let me know. As
time goes by, this 'recipe' is bound to
change further, so feel free to mail me
and ask for an update.
Some ingredients, like the seaweed flour,
can be difficult to obtain, but if you
persist, you can get lucky. when I
bought the flour for the first time,
because the animal feeds dealer had to buy
a 25 kilo sack, which no-one else wanted,
I bought the whole sack, even though I
figured it would take a couple of years to
use it all. It lasted
less than a season. Seaweed
flour is a huge improvement on wheat flour
for binding. It isn't so downright
fattening, it boosts the amount of algal
proteins/amino acids, and it adds trace
elements. 3 for the price of 1, as
it were. It does need to be very
fine, like flour. Granular seaweed
won't bind, messes up the consistency of
the mix, and isn't digested well by the
fish.
There is in my opinion, no need for a
winter food and summer food (i.e. a
carbohydrate rich winter food with wheat
germ, and a higher protein food for
the summer.) unless you are taking
the hobby far further than the average
hobbyist. If it's bad to feed
protein in winter, why does "winter
food" contain so much protein? Plus,
so called summer foods can contain as much
as 60% carbohydrate.
(If you read the labels on commercial
foods, carbohydrate is used as a
binder, to hold the food together, fiber is
irrelevant, and ash provides minerals.
In reasonably hard water, this too may not
be important.)
As regards cold water feeding, again,
opinion is mixed. Some view it with
horror, other view it as sensible to feed
if the koi are willing. If you are
going to feed at cooler temps, the
following should be borne in mind.
Make sure your bio filtration is excellent,
rather than adequate, and test regularly to
ensure that ammonia or nitrite isn't
building up. Large females that are
building up egg masses are best starved for
some of the winter to reduce the risk of
their becoming egg bound. However,
the usual winter period where they show no
interest in food is probably well in excess
of this, and the average unheated ponder is
unlikely to need to worry about that.
One school of thought says what little
carbo koi need, they can make from protein.
The other, that carp require 40% of their
diet to be carbo.
This apparent divergence can, I believe, be
explained by the difference between the
diets of wild and pond carp. What
carbo wild fish require, they will get from
algae, water plants and, an important but
often overlooked source, their live food.
A lot of live food contains carbohydrate
based food in their guts, and this is a
source of carbo for a lot of apparently non
carbo eating animals.
In a koi pond, these food sources are
mostly absent or reduced to very low
levels, and in the case of the live food,
often low levels of variety too. If
fish in these conditions are simply fed
fish derived protein, and nothing else,
deficiency diseases and other dietary
deficiencies will be a distinct
possibility.
Most (not all) pellets contain a high % of carbo, which can reach as high as 50%. This
is usually derived from corn, wheat or Soya,
none of which can remotely be called part
of a natural diet. (There is a brand
of pellet that uses algae as binder.)
I have no solid experimental evidence to
prove this, but it is my opinion that it is
not good to feed koi wheat, corn or soy
based carbohydrates. I think that
this leads to cloudy water, clogged filters
and fat fish, and I would prefer that my
fish had, wherever possible, all their
carbohydrates from natural or algal
sources.
A cynical view would be to point out that
carbo is a comparatively cheap energy
source compared to the more natural fish
oils. Fish oils provide energy
in addition to being an excellent source of
essential fatty acids, oils and vitamins.
In the spring, when the fish start to show
an interest in food, conventional wisdom
states that they should be fed a carbo rich
diet to "awaken" their digestive
systems. However, if koi are given
the choice between pellet, paste food or a
high protein item like prawn tails, I have
found that they will start feeding earlier
and more aggressively on the prawn tails,
and it is not until they have been eating
these for a while will they start eating
paste. Even then, they prefer paste
to pellet, and sometimes can take a while
to start feeding enthusiastically on
pellets.
This recipe is aimed at the average
hobbyist, to provide a good all year round
food which needs no great variation.
It does not claim to be "The
Ultimate", or even to be complete, in
the sense that it is guaranteed to contain
every single element essential for growth.
It does try to come close, and it does offer
you the opportunity to manipulate and alter
the mix. This paste food is an attempt
to give the koi a similar quality and
variety of foodstuffs as it would find in
the wild.
For those interested in experimenting with
diet, and concerned to try and maximize
growth, there are strategies available for
altering the feeding during the powering
down in the autumn months. These
are credited with maximizing the growth
potential over the winter due to growth
hormones whose production is encouraged by
reducing the fish etc derived protein as the
water cools. Conventionally, this
involves switching to a winter diet based
heavily on carbohydrates supplemented with
some wheat germ. I shall be running
experiments next autumn with a 'winter
paste', which will involve reducing the
protein levels in the paste, and possibly
increasing the amounts of algae/seaweed
flour. In unheated ponds, there is a
naturally occurring period of fasting as the
fish lose interest in food, but if the pond
is heated more attention needs to be paid to
this subject.
A lot of people make the mistake of
transferring observed feeding practices in
humans and other mammals to carp. Carp
are fish. In the wild they feed all
year round on live food; worms, snails, bugs
etc., none of which are renowned for having
a high level of carbohydrate, except as part
of the gut contents. This high protein
food increases and is supplemented in the
summer months when the plants grow.
For humans, carbohydrate is a necessity.
It provides us with a concentrated source of
energy to move us great distances while
holding us up against gravity and at the
same time keeping us warm. Koi do not
need energy to warm themselves like we do,
and none under normal circumstances to fight
against gravity. A fish swimming
normally only uses a fraction of its muscle
mass, so even there, its energy expenditure
is minimal, and is best supplied by fish oil
in the diet.
Don't feed bread and cereal products etc,
but where you feed pelleted foods, stick to
a good quality pellet food, and feed as much
live food as possible. Make sure that
wherever you collect live food, especially
snails, no slug pellets or other "bug
killers" are used. Koi love
snails, but you have to crush the shells
which is not for the sensitive or squeamish.
Small slugs are usually taken with
enthusiasm, but the big ones like severed
thumbs can be a bit too much for them.
Without a doubt, live food is the best.
It is often rich in some of the amino acids
and other substances that can be scarce in
pelleted food, and this can enable the fish
to make better use of the other food you
give them. A wider variety of
proteins, and hence amino acids, means
better use of proteins for growth, and less
waste amino acids meaning less ammonia for
the filters to deal with.
Woodlice, worms, spiders, grubs, centipedes,
the list is almost endless. Avoid
maggots, mealworms, millipedes and adult
beetles, and it is wise to crush the
"head" of anything like spiders or
beetle grubs which could bite the fish's
mouth, and possibly put it off these
valuable foodstuffs. Live freshwater
foods should be avoided due to the risk of
transferring parasites. Remember that
some parasites are not removed by washing
and cleaning, but are embedded in cysts deep
in the tissues where they wait for their
host to be eaten. For this reason
anything that lives in water - salt or
fresh, should be cooked thoroughly before
feeding it to the koi.
Dried insects can be bought from bird food
suppliers as an excellent dietary
supplement.
Vegetable food. As the water gets
warmer, the fish can start to get interested
in plant based foods. Soft lettuces
floated upside down will give them something
to chew on, and sliced oranges and
grapefruit are often recommended.
Some types of lettuces are better than
others. If they aren't
interested in sliced citrus fruit, you can
mix some juice into the day's paste food,
and if that makes it sloppy, add a little
more "flour" to restore the
texture. (Or you can just add vitC
powder to each day's food.) Other
vegetable additions that have been suggested
are sweet peppers (red and green), and some
of the darker green leaf vegetables.
These can be hung in the water as a bunch
for the koi to tear at, or chopped fine and
added to the paste.
Animal proteins. Stick to fish,
seafood, etc.. It is very unwise to
feed proteins from terrestrial animals, e.g.
chicken, beef, pork lamb etc. The
reason for this is fat content.
Fat and oils are both lipids, and fish need
lipids. Seafood contains oils, i.e.
those lipids that are liquid at coldwater
temperatures, while meat contains fat, those
lipids that are solid at room temperature.
A koi that eats meat proteins will also be
eating some fat. This can get laid
down as fatty deposits in the body, which
the fish will not be able to digest, and
this can result in the degeneration of
certain organs. Never forget that carp
are dustbin fish. They will eat
anything and everything, a fact recognized
by carp fishermen who achieve success with
baits made up of everything from custard to cat food.
The great Isaac Walton even gave a recipe
for carp bait that ignored cat food, but was
rather made from meat of the cats
themselves. No carp is going to turn
down any food on the basis that it isn't
healthy.
You will see that sometimes some commercial
foods contain animal proteins. This is
alleged sometimes to be ground up feathers.
According to my school biology lessons,
feathers are made out of keratin, an
indigestible protein. My thought on
the subject is that unless your fish are
part clothes moth, they are unlikely to gain
much nutrition from eating feathers.
Some foods do hydrolyze the feather meal to
give digestible protein and fat.
Again, this would seem to be a food
ingredient that is less than top range, and
digestible only in the loosest sense of the
word.
Prawns are a great treat, but pull off the
'heads' and remove the shells. 3
reasons; the heads have a sharp spike, (the
rostrum), they make a mess in the water and
the carapaces get spat out and lie on the
bottom. Save all this for the recipe.
Cut the prawn tails up and feed all year
round, especially in the winter AS LONG AS
THEY WILL TAKE THEM. Don't give them
the washed out shell less prawns from the
freezer cabinet. They really need prime
protein and oil, and shell on prawns provide
this. (Note. Do not thaw them
aggressively with warm or hot water, as
this will drive the oils out of the prawn
tissues, which is a waste). Plus, you
help to keep the filter fed, so hopefully
you won't have so many problems in the
spring. NOTE. If the temperature
drops too low, your biofilter may not
process ammonia etc so quickly, so monitor
water quality very carefully if you feed at
low temps, both in autumn and spring.
Other primo snacks are mussels, cockles, and
any other cooked seafood they enjoy.
The main ingredients here only cost a few
pounds a kilo, and the protein content is
very high. Prawns at £5 a kilo
(less by the box), may seem expensive,
but if you work out what you are actually
paying per kilo for the small percentage of
fish protein and oil in the pelleted food,
then by comparison, prawns are pretty cheap.
Especially if you eat the tails and use the
shell waste and heads! It should be
noted that what is conventionally treated as
waste, is actually the most valuable.
The heads and shells of prawns, and the guts
and internal organs of fish, squid etc are
very valuable food sources, and should never
be discarded.
To prepare the paste food, always use a
reasonably large food processor ( A
blender doesn't really have the required
oomph, though having one to hand is useful
for some of the later stages.)
I have a square stainless steel pestle and
mortar which I smash up the crab legs, waste
and shells to splinters. When using
crab, or whole mussels, I then put the mush
into a blender and then sieve it to remove
any larger shell fragments which get another
pounding and blending. This gives you
a gritty soup which can be added to the
protein paste base.
When you are processing crab shell
especially, it can be hard to puree.
If necessary add the juice from cooking the
squid or fish to help turn it into a smooth
paste, as that's better than adding plain
water (Use the minimum amount of water
to cook the fish, and never throw the
cooking water away, but add it too the mix.)
If you are using a whole crab in the recipe,
choose a female crab, as they are supposed
to have more brown meat, which I feel (no
scientific basis here) contains more useful
oils, amino acids etc. than does white meat.
Slight update on the food recipe here.
One of the things that has been bothering
me about the recipe is its lack of
quantifiable figures to create a
repeatable, reliable result. Also,
it's a nuisance to get the equipment
out for a small mix, but get a big mix
wrong, and you are stuck with that, or else
you have to throw a whole batch away.
There is a way round this which also
addresses the problem of damage to the oil
based vitamins in the cod liver oil during
freezing. The advantage is that
overall the work is no greater. It
takes me about 1 - 2 hours to make up
enough base mix for a month to six weeks,
and the daily chore of mixing the food for
each day takes about ten minutes.
Plus, as mentioned earlier, there is a new
ingredient you can add. Bird food
dealers also sell dried bugs. In the
UK, J E Haithe (01472 357 515) will sell
you a kilo of dried "flies"
(actually dried water boatmen) for £6, and
these represent a useful additive.
Back to the recipe. Instead of mixing
everything, you can simply prepare the base
mix, and freeze that in useable daily
amounts, then on the day, defrost the basic
protein paste, add the cod-liver oil etc,
and mix in the seaweed flour. This
ensures that the mix is very fresh, the
vitamins are as un-degraded as possible,
and the texture doesn't change in the
freezer. No need to use the mixer
again, as it is easier to stir up the mix
for the day in a bowl by hand. It
only takes ten minutes, if that.
Eat lots of prawns in the shell, as the
heads etc are possibly the best ingredient.
For a basic mix, I use 2 kilos of
prawn waste, 1 kilo of whole herring
and 1 kilo of whole squid. Cook the
whole herring and squid thoroughly and
allow to cool, keeping all the juices.
Put 1/4 the capacity of the mixer each of
the herring and squid and puree well to a
liquid. Add twice that weight of
prawn waste, and puree again, adding juice
or water until the puree is smooth enough.
Add some of the crab/mussel/lobster shell
soup, four rounded spoonfuls of dried bugs
and puree again. This will be the
basic protein paste. Don't worry
about bits of bone, etc. When you
roll balls out between your fingers to feed
the fish, you will feel them and they can
be removed. The proportions of each
ingredient need not be perfectly balanced.
To store the paste, use small pots with
lids, like the drinks containers from
McDonald's etc. I use a 1/3 or 1/2 liter
container as this is a handy size for me,
depending on how much the fish are eating
each day. Alternatively, fill it to
within half an inch of the top, smooth it
to a flat surface, and put it into the
freezer. When the top has frozen
solid, pour a little water onto the top to
cover the paste with 1/4 inch of water or
so and leave it to freeze again. This
system prevents freezer burn, and
keeps it fresh.
A 1/3 liter of paste weighs approx 1/3
kilo. By using a common start weight
we can more carefully blend the food.
To 1/3 liter thawed paste, I add two
crushed vit B tablets, a level teaspoonful
of vit C powder, a sachet of dried yeast, a
slightly rounded teaspoon of spirulina and
some dried silkworm (which I grind down
fine in a herb mill - this should only be
fed when the water is warm enough). I
mix this in before adding the cod-liver
oil, mixing again and then adding two
rounded soupspoonfulls of clay, and mix
again. I then add the seaweed flour
slowly, mixing all the time until it has a
good texture. This is then put in the
fridge in a plastic bag.
It is interesting to see how much cod-liver
oil you need. Koi pellets contain
about 5% and commercial food fish pellets
are alleged to contain more. Cod
liver oil is not cheap, but if you buy it
from a horse feed store, it is a lot
cheaper. Be careful to buy pure oil,
as some are mixed with Soya oil, which
should be avoided. If you add too
much oil, you will see an oily scum develop
on the water, so cut back on the next day's
mix.. The oil and clay in the mix
give a good texture that will hold the
paste together well in the water.
Thru experimentation, I have found that if
the cod-liver oil is in excess of 7%, it
tends to cause a white, opaque, oily scum
to form in the skimmer/filter. That
is an equivalent amount to 70ccs (7 dessert
spoonfuls) per kilo of finished paste mix.
There are a number of additives
suggested, e.g. vitamins, clay, wheat germ
oil, spirulina, laver (algae again), chitin, propolis,/royal jelly, bee pollen, ground up
silkworms and yeast. Any clay
used should be good quality bentonite clay
suitable for fish. Yeast is an
interesting ingredient. Some pelleted
foods use derivatives of yeast which have a
good reputation for improving health, and
including yeast in the mix could reduce the
need to add vitamin B. Vitamins should
be added to the food on the day of feeding.
Wheat germ oil is rich in vitamins and fatty
acids, just like cod-liver oil. Chitin
is another useful ingredient. The
owner of my local Chinese restaurant saves
me the shells from the big prawn tails they
use. I bake them in the oven on gas
mark 2 or 3 until they are pink and bone
dry. Then I put them into the food
processor until they are small enough for
the blender to turn to powder. Be
careful handling these. They have
sharp spikes that will cause a nasty,
infected wound, but once turned into a dry,
fine powder, they are safe to handle.
The seaweed is rich in all the minerals,
metals and trace elements you might expect
to find in any natural salt water product.
Some people do suggest that a small amount
of manganese sulphate, about a tenth to half
a gram in a kilo of paste is a useful
addition to promote growth. I have
tried this for the last season, and I
haven't killed anything yet. I have
noticed good growth, it has to be said, but
whether it was down to this, I couldn't say.
You add it, like anything else at your own
risk. Please note that more is not
better. Ram this down the throats of
your fish by the pound, and your roses will
do well, not the koi.
If you wish, you can buy herring roes by the
kilo to add to the mix. Always use the
widest variety of seafood to mimic the diet
of a wild carp, which includes annelids, mollusks,
fish and arthropods and everything else that
moves. Crabs, prawns and
anything else with legs and a hard outer
covering will do as arthropods,
shellfish and squid are mollusks, and the
annelids (worms) you can dig up in the
garden and feed to the fish direct.
Some people are concerned that feeding worms
can add undesirable bacteria to the pond, so
bear that in mind. If you buy
shellfish in the shell, (e.g. mussels) there
is no reason why the shells should not be
crushed up very fine and added to the mix.
Squid is an excellent addition, and I would
use a decent amount in the recipe.
Oily fish are a valuable source of protein
and oil. Remember that fish oils are
the single best source of energy for your
fish.
Always obey the golden rule. If it
lives in water, cook it. There are
even some parasites that can pass from a
seawater host to a fresh water one, so never
feed raw fish, water snails or anything that
lives in water.
Thickening the mix.
Conventionally, wheat, corn and/or soy flour
is used to thicken and bind foods, both
paste and pellet. One of the aims of
this recipe is to remove all unnecessary
wheat, corn and soy carbohydrates from the diet, and
boost the algal content. It has been
found that seaweed, ground to a fine flour
is an excellent substitute for wheat flour.
You can buy seaweed from animal feed stores,
it's used as a supplement to horse feed, and
I feel that this in addition is a
useful source of trace elements. There
is another reason for being generous with
algae. A fish protein only diet can be
deficient in certain amino acids, especially
methionine and cytosine. When this is
so, a large percentage of the protein fed is
unusable, which means the waste amino acids
are burned for energy, and higher levels of
ammonia are excreted into the pond. A
generous proportion of algae in the diet
means the fish will use more of the food,
get better growth and produce less waste.
The seaweed does need to be as fine as
flour. Too coarse, and the food will
be friable, and break up in the water, which
is both messy and wasteful. Really
fine seaweed flour gives the paste an
excellent texture, rather like plasticine/play dough/putty.
It's easy to shape into balls for feeding,
and holds together well in the water.
Having said all this, I do feed some
pellets. I was advised that with the best
will in the world, the paste food may lack
some vital ingredient. Since pellets are
sold as a complete food (to whit, containing
ALL the minerals, vitamins, trace elements
etc that koi need), feeding some pellets
should mean that this problem is properly
addressed. However, over the last year
or two, the amount of pellets I feed has
more than halved, while the weight of fish
has increased.
When buying pelleted food, read the label
very carefully. Bear in mind that in a
lot of pellets, you will be lucky to get 10%
by weight of actual fish proteins.
Some pellets contain huge amounts of corn
& Soya (both of which contain protein)
and even feathers. These are ground up
and hydrolyzed to make them
"edible". Feathers are, I
believe made up of the protein keratin,
which also forms your toenails.
Suitably ground up and hydrolyzed toenails
will also be edible. Please bear in
mind that edible has a wide range of
meanings, and can in theory include anything
that is not actually toxic. For
humans, grass is edible, just not
nutritious. If the pellet of your
choice contains 10% fish protein, and little
else in the way of useful ingredients, it
could be argued that those pellets are
actually costing you ten times their face
value.
This information is not aimed at any
particular pellet or manufacturer of pellets
or their lawyers, nor is it meant to imply
that said manufacturers are involved in
shady practices. Your fish will not be
in any immediate danger of harm by
feeding them pellets, corn, feather meal or
even toenails.
Do bear in mind that this paste is an
extremely rich food. If your koi are
couch potatoes in a shallow pond, and you
shovel this down their throats, you may end
up with fat fish. If you can
return the water to the pond to give them a
good current to swim against, the exercise
will help to keep them in good shape, as
will a good depth of water.
Imagine that the proteins you feed your koi
are strings of beads (amino acids). Red,
orange, yellow, green, blue, black and
white. The koi have to take these
strings of beads, break them into individual
beads and then make bracelets (koi
proteins). These koi bracelets have to
have five beads each of red, orange, yellow,
and green, but only one blue bead, and no
black or white beads. You cannot make
a bracelet until you have all the necessary
beads, and you cannot start a bracelet until
the last one is finished. At the end of each
day, when you have made all the bracelets
you can with the beads you have, you
have to burn or dump all the unused beads.
Doing this puts a strain on your filter.
Plant proteins have orange and yellows, and
lots and lots of black and white beads.
Fish proteins have lots and lots of red,
orange, no yellows, a lot of greens and a
few blues. As you can imagine, plant
proteins give a lot of ash, but so will fish
proteins if there are no yellows and not enough
blues, as yellow and blue are
controlling colors. While fish will
not do well without the yellows (amino acids
present in plant and algal tissues which are
essential as carp cannot manufacture these),
it is also very useful, if you can add blue
in any number. Not only do you use
much more of the other colors, but at the
end of the day, there are less to burn.
Feeding koi live foods such as
invertebrates, etc, has been observed to
cause growth out of all proportion to the
amount fed. You may think that a
handful of bugs every now and again is not
all that valuable, and not worth the
trouble. However, it is analogous to
throwing the bracelet maker a handful of
blue beads.
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