Falafels & butternut squash stew

Cauldron Moroccan spiced falafel bites 180g x2
Potatoes - 4
Onion - 1
Butternut squash - half a large one
Kale - some
Chopped tomatoes - 1 tin
Garlic - 2 cloves
Lemon juice - approx 2 tsp
Oil from Riverford mixed olives with chilli and garlic (or olive oil, coriander seed, cumin seed, dried chilli)

Cook the Falafel bites

Chop the potatoes fairly small & par boil for around 5 minutes

Fry the onion in the oil & spices for a few minutes then add the potatoes

Chop & the butternut squash and put in the potato water.

Add the butternut squash to the frying pan.  Then add the chopped tomatoes, some water, the lemon juice & the kale.

Goes well with Nethergate Lemon Head beer

Dwarf puffers again

We've got some more dwarf puffers. One never looked that happy and disappeared after a week or two, but the other is happy and seems to have reduced the number of snails in the tank.

Dwarf puffers deceased

We found the second of the dwarf puffers we bought recently dead today. The first died earlier in the week. One had curvature of the spine, and since it was the only fish effected it seems most likely that it was genetic.

Dwarf Puffers

We bought two dwarf pufferfish (Carinotetraodon travancoricus) on Saturday.  I chose them partly because I like puffers, but also because they should keep the snail numbers down.  We think we're got a male and a female, but it's not that easy to tell when they're young.  They're currently the smallest fish in the tank at 1.5-2cm and should grow to around 4cm.  I've researched dwarf puffers on the internet and found differing opinions on how aggressive they are, some people have found them to be extremely aggressive, but so far ours are fairly peaceful.  There seems to be a consensus that they need an interesting tank with plenty of places to explore, which hopefully our tank is.

Links:
The Puffer Forum - Carinotetraodon travancoricus & Sexing dwarf puffers

Current tank contents:
Black Neons (6)
4 Kuhli Loach (4?)
Dwarf Puffers (2)

Kuhlis get everywhere!

I cleaned out the tank and filter before we went to Maidenhead Aquatics to get some new fish.  After squeezing the dirt out the filter sponges, rinsing the dirt and algae cleaning the ceramic hula hoops and putting everything back together I noticed a kuhli loach in the bucket.  The only way it could have got there is if it had swum into the filter.

I didn't want to use a net to get the kuhli back into the tank as kuhlis have a spine near their eye so I gradually reduced the amount of water in the bucket until I could transfer the kuhli into a jug, and then allowed it to swim back into the tank.  We'd only seen three of four kuhli loaches we bought at one time, so I initially assumed that this was the fourth, despite it being significantly smaller.  However I thought I'd seen something else in the bucket.  A bit more investigation revealed that there was a dead kuhli of a similar size to the live one, so the small kuhli must be a second generation.  I've not seen any other small kuhlis but since they are so good a hiding we may have more than we think.  On our trip to Maidenhead AquaticsI picked up some sponge filters to go over the filter intake to prevent it happening again.

Kuhli loaches

Our last catfish died a while ago, and we were down to one black neon so on 26th January we bought some new fish - 4 kuhli loaches (Pangio kuhlii) and 5 more black neon tetras.  The kuhli loaches all hid after putting them in the tank and we've not seen them all together since.  At one point we didn't see any for so long that I thought they must have all died, but we then started seeing them again.  Since then we've seen three together so one might have died, but they are so good at hiding that we'll probably never know.

Our current tank contents:
Black Neons (6)
4 Kuhli Loach (4)
Pineapple Swordtails (some of various ages)

Pagham Harbour

We visited Pagham Harbour again and explored the north side of the harbour. We saw a sparrowhawk and a hobby. The bird lists in the visitor centre said that ospreys and avocets had been seen the week before but we didn't see any.