Back to the blog

Back to the blog

As always my obsessive nature has led me to start lots of new projects and neglect a few of the old ones. This first post back will take an eclectic look round some of my current projects, hobbies and interests.

Aquariums

I currently have quite a few freshwater aquariums running. The marine aquarium that has featured at various times throughout this blog has been taken down as I did not feel I had the time or the interest that it needed devoting to it.

Planted aquarium

I have pretty much always had at least one planted aquarium, as it combines two of my favourite interests.
My current display tank is a Fluval Spec 60 with the lid removed. I changed the light from the stock LED light To a Fluval Fresh & Plant 3.0, mostly because the stock light needs to be manually switched on so cannot be used on a timer. Its also The first tank at home I have had Presurised CO₂ on.
It has currently got a quite bit of algae from neglect and not remembering to add liquid fertiliser. It also has a window behind it which doesn't help. At some point I will get round to putting a background on it, which would solve this.
It currently houses quite a number of different fish.
Including, but not limited to:

• Girardinus metallicus - black chin Livebearer
• Rosy loach (I would put a scientific name, but no one seems to agree on one yet as this is a fairly newly discovered fish)
• Nematobrycon palmeri - Emperor tetra
• Aspidorus fuscoguttatus  - Tiny cory-like catfish
• Poecilia reticulata - A few random male guppies growing out just to see how the colours turn out from some old experiments.
• Caridina multidentata - amano shrimp
• Neocaridina davidi - Blue cherry shrimp

Plant tank (current)

Plant tank (previous scape, when I was keeping up with maintenance)

Emperor tetra

Breeding tanks.

Next I have my breeding tanks. These use air-powered sponge filters and have been home to all sorts of projects, past and present. Currently they house mostly various colours of Neocaridina shrimp, but also one has some Aspidoras spilotus.
One of the tanks also has a spider plant growing in a hang on the back filter (Random project - it does pretty well and should be sucking up nitrate, although I never test the water).

Breeding tanks

Orange Neocaridina And Ottocinclus tank which is the right of the four tanks

Orange shrimp (in need of a cull to get rid of the non-orange)

Blue shrimp

Plants (non aquatic)

I am still keeping a few chilli plants around but nothing like before, maybe I will show these in another post.

As previously mentioned I also like keeping house plants in my aquarium filters. This combines two of my hobbies and alsos help suck up nitrate.

Pothos  Epipremnum growing in plant tank filter

Another set of projects which I started a few years ago, neglected at times, are my terrarium jars. I love setting them up, but they only come good a long time later. I think this one has be running Three years.

Terrarium jar

Pond

As always the pond is very over grown. Lots of iris are flowering and I have no idea what fish are in there. Generally I chuck a load of tropicals in there just for the summer and I don't know how they are doing till I net the pond in September. My most successful year i added 6 rosy barbs in May and there were 165 in September.

Pond

Japanese iris - Iris ensata 

Water lily

I think that's quite enough for this first post back. I will do some more in depth posts, concentrating on one thing at a time, some time soon. I will also get the DSLR back out and take some better photos for future posts.

I will leave you with the other major change in my life since I last wrote this blog. 

Daisy and Dora Who are F1b Cockapoos (Cockapoo(Spaniel x Poodle) x Poodle)

They are One and two years old, can be challenging at times, but also endless fun!

Thanks for reading!