All the Creatures

What do you do when you go on vacation and you have fish as pets? If you have an aquarium you can purchase those “weekend” feeder blocks you can place in the tank. If you have fresh water fish in your tank you can also buy some floating plants they can kibble on and the plant can also supply some limited filtration.

That is fine for tank kept fish but what about pond kept fish? Most pond kept fish need to be fed twice a day if the pond is man made and does not have a natural bottom in which the fish can search for food. Do you have someone to feed the fish? If not you can purchase an automatic pet feeder that will dispense fish food at regular intervals. Here is a picture of what they look like:

This feeder can be set to dispense 1oz of pelleted feed per minute. There are many other types of automatic pet and fish feeders on the market, I even have 5 automatic horse feeders that are designed to dispense pelleted horse feed in the mornings. Just do an internet search and you are sure to come up with something on sale for what your needs are.

A word of caution about automatic pet feeders, they will only dispense dry non-sticky feeds. Don’t use feeds that have any sugar or molasses in it as it will only clog up the mechanism.

I think we have all gone through this, either as the child or the parent. In my case both. I remember as a child wanting and getting a 5 gallon fish tank with goldfish. I also remember being told to keep the tank clean. This was back in the days when filters amounted to changing part of the water at least once a week and was all done by hand - mine. Well after a few times at that I got lazy and the water got really bad. Dad changed it a few times and we were lucky the fish didn’t die, but they did get water temp shock. They recovered. I had them for about 6 years until we moved and I don’t remember what happened to them. What I do remember was the yelling at me or my sister to “take care of the fish”.

That was when I was about 10 years old. Move forward 8 years. Now we had a dog. I always was the one to take the dog for a walk, no one else bothered. Soon after that I got married and my husband and I had our own pets. Both of us were denied pets of our own as we were growing up so we made up for lost time.

5 years into our marriage we decided to start a family. Our daughter was born and she just fit right in with the pets. She took care of them too - until this year at the age of 13. Now she needs to be reminded ” does the bird have food and water?” “did you clean out the cat box?” All to the very predictable answer “I know Mom”

I know that she will grow out of that stage but it sure is taking some time to do so.

All the Creatures

Many years ago I had the opportunity to raise Koi as a hobby divx basic instinct 2 . Our family bought several 8 inch long fish from a local breeder. We fashioned a pond out of a large child’s wadding pool that was sunk in the ground. We had natural filtration with water plants. The Koi loved it so much they would breed! If I had more knowledge and of course a larger area we would be still breeding them today. Several books and updated technology make it much easier than ever to raise Koi.

All the Creatures