Tom's aquatic and gardening projects: Introduction

Hello everyone. I have decided to write a blog so that you can keep up with all my different hobbies and projects.

First, a brief introduction. For those who don't already know me, my name is Tom. I currently work at an aquarium shop in Crews Hill. I have been keeping fish for almost 20 years and studied them at college. Throughout this time I have also been interested in plants and especially aquatic plants. The other thing to note about me is that I have a bit of an obsessive collector mentality. When I get into a subject I devote a lot of time and study to it, but tend to get distracted by the next subject/project. There are quite a few hobbies/projects I have done or are still active in. These include: planted aquariums, breeding fish, reef aquarium, ponds, shrimp breeding, wine/beer making, chilli growing/collecting, other vegetable gardening and many more. I will attempt to document and take pictures on this blog of some of my current projects.

So on to a quick introductory tour...

Let’s start with my freshwater aquarium. Currently residence to a lot of red cherry shrimp; some tiger endler males with assorted guppy females and a couple of red ancistrus. The plants are a bit over grown in the middle and neglegted at the sides because one of my lights has gone so I centred the remaining one.

Next we have the marine aquarium. It is a Kent Bioreef 94l and it has a Fluval spec aquarium hooked up as a refugium. Residents include black saddleback clowns, green mandarin, lemon damsel, navy blue damsel, hermits, fire shrimp and an urchin. Again, the tank is in need of some attention, fish are all happy and note the masses of algae around, and one coral is taking over the whole tank but I have not yet had the courage to take it out and do some fragging.

The pond. The pond is very overgrown and you can barely see any water but there is fry in there so who knows what has been breeding this year last year it was rosey barbs.