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Coy Fish Pond

Coy ponds have become the rage in home and gardening in the past decade. Avid gardeners are finding out how to successful have a coy pond that will add beauty and relaxation to their outdoor living area. With a few design tips, you can have a beautiful coy pond, too. I'm here to provide you with a few of those tips.

What is a Coy Fish?

First, what is a coy fish? Whether you spell it as koi (correct spelling) or coy, coy are a type of carp and come in a variety of colors, each with their own unique name. The origin of coy comes from Japan as long ago colorful coy fish were given to kings as rare gifts. Throughout the years, special coy breeders emerged providing many variations available today from colorful sanke, showa and kohaku coy to those with long, flowing fins called butterfly coy or long fin coy. Regardless of what color or type of coy you may have, having them in your coy pond or water garden can add a vibrant splash of color not found in other fish ponds. Topped with pretty water lilies and other water garden plants, having a coy pond is like creating a natural oasis in your own backyard!

Coy Fish Size and Longevity

Coy are cold water fish and can live successfully in ponds nearly anywhere in the USA and abroad. They can grow up to 3' long in the wild and can live for nearly 200 years! For many coy owners in the USA though, creating a coy fish pond somewhere around 10,000 - 50,000 gallons of water is the 'norm'. So what do coy need in order to survive? They need a lot of space to grow, good water quality, good aeration and water circulation, food, oxygen, a low stress environment and be kept within a pond that has a good, overall coy pond design.

Coy Pond Design

What shape you give your coy pond is really up to you but those with large round curves, those that are oval, round or a slight figure 8 will do well. What you want to accomplish when you design your coy pond is design it to provide the best water circulation from one end of the pond to the other. One way to provide that is to have a preformed waterfall on one end of the pond and a skimmer with the pond pump inside it, on the other. From this setup, the water is sucked through the skimmer opening from the pump inside it and pushed up to the waterfall where the water flows off the waterfall and goes back into the pond. This creates water circulation from one end of the pond to the other.

Slightly pitching the bottom of the pond from the waterfall area on the opposite end of the pond towards the skimmer also helps in providing good water circulation along the bottom of the coy pond. In addition, you could add a bottom drain when you're installing your pond which can be plumbed into the front of the skimmer. If a ball valve is plumbed into this opening, simply turning the valve can adjust the flow that will flow from the bottom drain and skimmer opening at the same time. Having a bottom drain has huge benefits on providing the best water circulation to your coy pond and can really come in handy when cleaning the pond as all the silt and debris that's may be on the bottom of your coy pond can be sucked up through the bottom drain and pumped out.

Coy Pond Kits

There are many pond kits available that will provide everything you need to create a successful coy pond. Typically, a pond kit comes with a fish pond liner, pond skimmer, pond pump, pump tubing, preformed waterfall and maybe some underwater lights and a few pond chemicals. There are many different sizes to choose from and there's information online on how to build a pond with step-by-step instructions, how to properly take care of a pond, pond maintenance info, landscaping ideas and more.

It's always best to educate yourself first before attempting to create your first coy pond or water garden. There's much more to it than just digging a hole, putting in a pond liner and adding some fish. This is a new ecological system you're building and while digging a hole may not be that difficult, creating a coy pond the right way so the fish will thrive, the water plants will flourish, and the water clarity good enough so you will actually 'enjoy' your pond, well, there are key pieces of information you need to know to make this happen. As with anything else, an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure!

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