whetu

Yes please! Pumpkins are cheap at the moment so that would be a good recipe to have! I'm really enjoying this thread... it's getting me in the mood for some baking...

Ha ha great pic ... "AND THEY'RE OFF!"

Yeah it was my mum. I thought it was a terrible thing to do at the time, but I have to admit it worked!

I used to have an old recipe called "the Two-Hat Cure for Colds & Flu" Basically you take lemon, honey, hot water & whiskey or brandy & combine them in a large pitcher. Go to bed and put your hat on the end of your bed. Keep drinking until you see two hats on the end of the bed. Then you know you're cured.

When I was a kid my brother had a goldfish (in a bowl of course). We had an adult cat who would drink the water out of the bowl, but then we got a kitten who would balance on the edge of the bowl and try to catch the fish. One day Mum caught the kitten trying to catch the fish so she snuck up behind it and pushed it in! The kitten never balanced on the edge again and never tried to catch the fish. It took a long time before it would even drink out of the bowl again.

I used a paste of baking soda & water to get it off. Just like my grandmother used to do.

soft hardwoods... hard softwoods... crikey it's confusing! So to go back to Caper's original question... how does one choose a suitable wood to put in an aquarium? (Assuming one doesn't have an electron microscope in one's pocket to study the cell structure of the wood one finds on the beach)

I've just caught up with this thread - what lovely tanks you all have! Some very inspiring aquascaping arrangements there. Makes me want to get my hands wet and rearrange my tank again :lol:

Sticky date pudding Chocolate cake Green ginger wine mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Barrie, I think you'll need to make my voodoo doll with drool coming out of its mouth :lol:

Thanks Ira I suppose that's the difference between a hardwood and a hard wood. Also, I think Caper would have trouble getting her balsa to stay sunk.

I recently had an injured fish and I found it useful to use a black marker pen and write the medication dosages directly on the glass tank. On the front of the tank I drew a line showing the water level when the tank contained exactly 20 litres. Then I used the formulae on the med bottles to calculate how much medication I needed for 20 litres of water and how often it should be administered. I wrote that on the front of the tank too. On the end of the tank I ruled up a chart with columns for date, time and what meds I had administered. When you have finished with a hospital tank you are always going to clean it very thoroughly, so it's simple just to rub off your writing. I hope this tip helps someone. Having a sick fish can be stressful enough as it is without trying to remember all the medication details too.

Correction: Swamp Kauri has been buried for about 45,000 years before they dig it up and make it into furniture. Well there you go Caper - 45,000 years in your tank sounds about right for a bit of that stuff! http://www.ancientkauri.co.nz/index.php ... t_raw_logs

:lol: :lol: Well Afrikan it's up to you how you keep your cold and weary guests warm!!

All good questions, Caper! You can usually tell by scraping or water-blasting off the soft surface. If you eventually get to a hard bit (too hard to scrape any more or to dent easily with your finger nail) then you have a hardwood. Also you can get to know your local hardwoods and you may be able to recognise it by its colour/grain once you have scraped off the surface a bit. Pine is an example of a soft wood. In NZ we have various native hard woods (they grow much slower than the soft woods so are not usually cultivated for timber). Even then, the heart wood of a tree is often hard, and the wood closer to the bark is often soft and sappy. Driftwood actually drifts on the ocean or on a lake - i.e. it floats. What we really need for the aquarium is bog wood or swamp wood that has sunk from many years of immersion. Often it will have been trapped under boulders in a river, then during a storm will get dislodged and wash downstream, so you may find it at a river mouth after a big flood or storm. You need to a. identify your wood so you know it's not a toxic type b. make sure it's not seeping sap c. be confident it has not been exposed to pollutants d. make sure you have removed any loose bark or rotten wood e. find out if it sinks (or make it sink) Some driftwood eventually turns into rocks! But not in your tank!! (Look up petrified wood on google if you're interested) Swamp Kauri in the far North of NZ has been under peat bogs for hundreds of years. People dig it out and make beautiful hardwood furniture out of it. I guess all wood will rot eventually - especially the little bits we put in our home aquariums. But the right wood might last maybe 100 years under water - and even then just the outer parts will rot, you or your fish will scrape the soft parts away and the core of the wood will still be solid.

Looks/sounds like India I think

How about mulled wine? You basically take some red wine, some citrus and some whole spices, bung them all in a pot and heat slowly. The house fills with a lovely spicey smell so it's nice to welcome cold and weary travellers with a roaring fire and some mulled wine! A bit more detail on the ingredients for anyone who's interested: 1 bottle red wine (cheap but not nasty!) 1 stick cinnamon 1 star anise 6 cloves Some sliced ginger root 1 orange - just the very outer zest and the juice - don't put the white pith in. Optional: some honey or brown sugar or a cupful of sherry or some brandy or green ginger wine. All the spices are optional and interchangeable so have fun experimenting with whatever you've got. Warm the wine gently and don't let it boil. A crock-pot on low is perfect, or on a trivet on top of the fireplace. Serve in pre-warmed sturdy glasses or pottery cups.

Caper, I never break up the peas when I feed them to my barbs and (so far!) nobody has choked. That's not to say they can't choke! But yeah they seem to do ok picking them up & spitting them out until a bit breaks off that's small enough to swallow.

Oh my goodness! So much crazy behaviour going on - people squeezing in between the bike and the following car, cutting in so close... meanwhile he's just chillin'! And wearing sandals and a T-shirt! Madness!

Thanks Afrikan. It's silly really - she was just a common little fish. It would only cost a few dollars to buy another one from the lfs. But nobody likes to see a fish suffer. I think my flatmate's right that I'm a slightly obsessed fish geek :roll:

Thanks Afrikan & ryanjury. Unfortunately the little gal died overnight. Afrikan, the fungus was a ring of fuzz right around her body, so it was on the wound itself rather than just the damaged tissue. ryanjury thanks for that info about meth blue. I only read your post today, but last night I had decided drastic action was required so I put 1 ml of meth blue in a syringe and squirted it directly onto the injury site. It turned the fungus bright blue but unfortunately didn't save the fish. I will keep this in mind and next time will treat a serious wound directly with meth blue well before it begins to fungus.

Well the gold kiwifruit was a hit. Thanks Captain Conkout. One of the bristlenoses has his head buried in it now, munching away! I'm reluctant to take it out but it's been in there since Saturday and there are now bits of fruit floating all over the tank - I need to give the filter a chance to catch up! Gold kiwifruit will definitely be used again.

I cook the peas and corn, but the spinach leaves, courgette and cucumber are raw. Sometimes I'll put a fancy (frilly) lettuce leaf in there too. They don't seem to pay much attention to parsley though.

By the way, I don't know what caused the injury. Her tank-mates are cherry barbs, gold barbs, clown loaches and bristlenoses. I doubt any of them will have injured her because: a) I have never witnessed any aggressive behaviour from any of them b) The injury is all around her tail, not just on one side. I suspect maybe she got jammed in a tight space and got hurt when she struggled to get free? Or maybe a rock or something fell down and she got trapped under it? The tank has plants, driftwood and round river stones. I wouldn't think there was anything in there sharp enough to hurt her. Poor little fishie!

Hi all, Is there anything else I can do to help this fish? Yesterday evening about 5:30pm I noticed that one of my female cherry barbs has suffered a serious injury. All the scales on the part of her body between her tummy and her tail have been stripped off (both sides), and there were bits of skin hanging off! Terrible to see! I immediately set up a hospital tank and netted her out of the community tank (easily because she can hardly swim!) I have only 20 litres of water in the hospital tank, an air stone and a heater. The water came straight from the community tank as my tap water is a drastically different pH to the community tank water. I added the following meds to the 20 litres of tank water: 5 ml stress coat 0.5 ml melafix 5 cc aquarium salt These are the recommended daily doses on the bottles for an injured fish. By mid-day today she had developed very visible clear/whitish fungus all over the injured area. I repeated the same dose of stress coat and melafix (I didn't add any extra salt). Now (less than 24 hours since the injury) the fungus has increased. What else can I do to get rid of the fungus? Malachite Green? Furan-2? Will I need to do a complete water change if I'm using different meds? Are any compatible/not compatible with each other?

What kind of fish do you have? My barbs, loaches and bristlenoses like spinach leaves, peas, corn, courgette & cucumber.