Recent content by Essjay

That is cycling with fish!

Congratulations :hooray:

In recent years I have used plants every time I've set up a quarantine tank, using several bunches of cheap elodea bought for the QT and floating plants from my main tank.

Unfortunately tanks don't cycle naturally. There either has to be a lot of plants to take up all the ammonia made by fish or there has to be a source of ammonia to grow the beneficial bacteria. Can I suggest you read these three articles...

Your Christmas/crab/thanksgiving cactus isn't the same as my plants - yours has so many different common names, it's worse than fish common names. Your stems have projections sticking out from the main stem, sort of spikes. My plants have indentations rather than spikes. The flowers are also a...

I have 4 "easter" cacti which so far have no flower buds developing. But last year the plants flowered better than ever before. I'm hoping they eventually do as well this year. Last year's flowers -

As I'm a housewife/home maker the whole house is my office. So I have 2 tanks in my 'office'

I just searched for hardness using a business based in Fishergate, Preston. United Utilities gives their hardness as 6.93 Clark which equates to 5.5 dH and 90 ppm. Way too soft for Rift Lake cichlids. If your hardness is similar, you'll need to add something to make your water harder if you want...

@dascrow ??

The only tale of woe with my heaters is the one which stopped working when I accidentally broke it cleaning the quarantine tank. There were 2 Bolivian rams (Mikrogeophagus altispinosus) in there at the time. I was keeping an eye on them because I bought them in winter and slipped on ice going...

Congratulations :hooray:

No, that's a whole of the UK delicacy :lol:

I mis-read that as chicken parmo at first and I thought why is someone from northeast USA making a Teesside delicacy? I've never actually eaten a chicken parmo, looking at one is enough to clog the arteries. Originally called a chicken parmesan, the EU banned the name as parmesan is an Italian...

With the API pH testers, if the reading is above the highest level/below the lowest level on the scale they will show the highest/lowest colour regardless of the actual reading. Always go by the one that has the colour somewhere on the scale. If standard shows the highest and high range the...