Hey Google Search Algorithm, how’s it going? I got a new post for you, fresh off the prefrontal cortex. Enjoy, and please add a description to my Google Search Result soon. I’ve done all I can; it’s up to you now.
It’s June 21st, the official first day of Summer. Spring started 3 days ago. Everybody wants to comment about it raining for two months straight. My favorites are the classic Dad Hot Takes like, “This is great for the reservoirs,” or “Oh yeah, we needed it, too,” as if they include themselves among the collective “we” of nature itself. They’re not wrong. It’s just a non-contributing statement. Everyone knows this and agrees – there’s no follow-up potential. It doesn’t add to or progress a conversation. But I digress. The rain was annoying, it slowed my tank building progress, but I made it through. It’s water under the bridge now. Right into the reservoir.
I got those tanks cycled using my army of goldfish, along with pre-cultured k1 beads and sponge filters, in two weeks (as opposed to the typical 6-8 weeks for dry start cycling)! My first shipment of koi arrived last Thursday, 6/15, and my first walk-in shopping day was the following Saturday. It went great, a lot of people came through! What a relief. I haven’t been in a position to support normal walk-in shopping in nearly two years. Operating by appointment, only selling koi by mail-in bulk orders, has been awful. Every phone call is this long speech full of caveats, apologies, and promises that I’m working to get back to a more normal shopping experience. Retelling the story of all the ways I’ve been shit on trying to run this little business, how I ended up in this confusing and irregular position, over and over. And that’s just the calls I get. I know the appointment requirement alone has been turning off hundreds of customers. There’s enough detail between Google Business and WordPress analytics to know the disparity between my internet traffic and actual calls/customers widened substantially since I lost the old shop. Suffice to say, it’s been super lame, and I’m excited for that stage to be over.
As for other cool shit I got planned: I got so much cool shit planned! You don’t even know, man! That’s why I’m gonna tell you! In a moderate length, enumerated list format!
- Shubunkin Breeding: I’m gonna start breeding my own shubunkins. They’re super popular, more difficult to buy from wholesalers than you’d expect, and the quality range is very high and unpredictable. For example: the blue shubunkins are particularly popular these days, and I ordered what I thought would be 150 3″ blue shubunkins. None were the blue type, and while half have pretty good white/orange/black calico patterns, the rest are pretty bland white/orange or just plain orange. Like, 50 are orange. Yeah they probably have a couple of iridescent scales on their sides or something, indicating they have shubunkin parents, but it ain’t right to sell an orange goldfish as a shubunkin. It’s not what people are expecting, and they’re gonna be really hard to sell.
So, I’ve got two really nice looking blue shubunkins picked out, and I’ll be setting up a spawning tank for them later this week. I know I’ll have to suck it up and cull some of the fry this time, but that’s the nature of the business. I didn’t cull anybody last year and now I have 100 tiny runts that are 1 or 2 inches long at 11 months old. I feed them and keep them in a nice tank in the basement but don’t expect to ever sell them. I’ve got them listed for 2$ and have zero takers so far. - Indoor Aquarium Fish Breeding: I need more to do in the winter, and would like to smooth out my income curve across the year. I’m going to start with breeding angelfish and bristlenose plecos, as those are common aquarium trade fish, and I happen to have breeding pairs of angelfish already. I also own a female bristlenose pleco who’s had babies before, and a male, but they’ve never met each other. We’ll see how that goes. I’ll probably focus on selling these wholesale to other aquarium shops at first. Pond customers don’t have as much overlap with aquarium customers as you’d think, and a small koi business is not where anybody will be looking to buy angelfish.
- Pond and Aquarium Plants: I’ve been buying up various types of aquatic plants, and learning how to propagate them. Lilies are by far the most in-demand but I just cannot get my hands on any. I think the widespread dreary weather we’ve had this spring is affecting plant nurseries as well.
- Cherry Shrimp!: The plants were initially just a component of the goldfish breeding plan. Specifically java moss. Java moss is a fantastic haven for microorganisms; various freshwater plankton that provide an excellent food source for newly born fish fry. I’ve had a clump of java moss under a grow light for about 3 weeks now. The hope is that I eventually grow a really big clump of java moss, and can tear off chunks to put in my fry tanks to provide food during the frys’ first days or weeks. It’s not not working, but of course a grow light over a fish tank is also going to promote algae growth. The algae plays a similar roll to java moss, but is harder to get a discrete chunk of, is choking out my java moss, and is kinda gross. Then I learned that cherry shrimp eat string algae, and are safe around fish eggs; they even clean the eggs sometimes! I don’t know if I’ll ever sell or breed the cherry shrimp but I hear they reproduce pretty reliably on their own. For now they’re just my super cute garden crew.
- Maybe not staying a retail shop in the future: This is a big long term plan topic to tack on to the end of a list of shit I’m doing this summer, but yeah. Local small retail sucks, and doesn’t look to be getting better. Online shopping is crushing it. In particular, niche markets like pet fish are becoming very difficult to survive in while operating locally. I’ve seen two longstanding aquarium shops here in Denver close down just this year, and watched a lot of startups like myself fail as well. All I really want to do is breed fish myself. If I could get to the point where I was breeding batches of fish and selling entire lots to other aquarium shops, that would be way cooler than what I’m doing now. Or selling them online. Being a middleman has always felt disingenuous. “Wow, you have such beautiful fish here” is a strange compliment to process when I had no part in the creation of those fish. Yeah, they’re cool fish. But I just bought them from a big farm. The farm did all the cool parts. I want to do the cool parts too. Do I think I can be a commercial scale goldfish breeder entirely in my house? Probably not, but I should at least learn more on a small scale first. So that’s what I’m gonna do.