Just because it's been a while..

A lot has happened over the last week or so, and at the same time nothing at all has happened. I'm finding now that I'm blogging I always wish I had a camera with me where ever I have gone so that I have photographic evidence of what I've done. Yet, even when I take a photo of the activities with my phone, I never get around to uploading them, and they just never seem to capture what it is I want to talk about. Anyway, A few little updates about my little projects, first being the veggie patch or should I say, the weed garden! Sadly the only things growing really well in the garden are weeds, all the seeds I have planted seem to have got to seedling stage and then stopped growing all together, and either staying like that or dying :( I'm not sure what I've done wrong exactly, apart from maybe not watering them enough? But they are just not doing anything. So it seems that I'll either have to give up and try again, OR simply try to grow something else in there other than veggies...maybe some tulips?

As for the fish tank, well I'm pulling my hair out over the algae issues I'm having. I googled algae outbreaks to see if there was anything I could do, or anything I was doing that could be contributing to the break out. I read that I needed to change 15% of the water every 2-3 days, so I've done that a good 3 times now. I also read that you cover the whole tank up and block out all light sources for 4-5 days. SO I did that. I then uncovered the tank, changed the water over, cleaned the filter and filter pipes, put algae killer into the water...and NOTHING has worked. The water is a horrid milky green colour :( I'm thinking I might have to take the fishies out, drain 90% of the water (and hope I don't kill the plants) and see if THAT works.

On a more positive note I've noticed that the guppies have started to get "busy" lol so there might be some baby guppies on the way. I just hope that the water change and so on doesn't stress them out so much that the females lose the babies.

SO we'll see how things go in the next few weeks!

The fish tank part 2:

So it’s been about a week and a bit and I’ve finally completed the fish tank! Well, mostly, for now :D

It was a bit of trial and error I got to say! When I first put the water in it went all murky and yuck. The log that I put in looked like some monster in the deep! I thought after a few days it’ll settle so I went to the fish shop and bought a cool backdrop that looks like a cliff face. When We got it home I was too impatient to cut it to size and wanted to try and put it in, much to Mikes displeasure. Sure enough, it wouldn’t fit and we ended up stirring up the sand again. Mike then took the backdrop out and cut it to size and we put it in again.

After another day or so the sediment was not settling and I realised that I may have made a boo boo. I realised I was meant to clean the sand and gravel prior to putting it into the tank (my bad). So with a bit of fiddling I managed to get the longer hose from the back yard, hooked it up to the funnel used to clean the water and with a few sucks, started to SLOWLY drain away the yucky water. Then, I hooked the hose up to the tap at the front and re-filled the tank with water, this time taking care not to stir up the sand by wedging the hose in the log.

So after a couple more days the water stayed a murky white colour, SO I marched myself to the fish store and had it tested. Nothing wrong, just a algae outbreak *sigh* so I grabbed some algae killer and a few dozen plants.

I came home, put in the algae killer and started to put the plants in. My arm frozen a took a step back to admire my work. Now it was time to wait till the plants had a chance to take hold. I even discovered there was a tag along, a sea snail I have named Bob lol

But I’m impatient, and after a week I couldn’t stand looking at a empty tank anymore! So I started to look up adds online to see if I could buy some cheap guppies. The ones at the pet store were crazy expensive! And I wanted a few. But alas, anywhere I looked they were a fair distance away and you had to get a minimum of 20. I didn’t want that many so I found a different shop, and with a little bargaining got 5 females and 5 males for $4 each, instead of $6.75, which is ok.

So now I have a wonderful fishtank built by my wonderful husband, and a cool underwater garden, that will one day be full of guppies (apparently they breed like crazy!)