I have a dream that one day I'll be culturing lots of live food and making my own frozen foods as well
in my fishroom I culture 7 types of live foods all year round breeding lots of live food can take up a lot of space and time consuming my grindal worm and earthworm culture need feeding daily I have five 35 l containers of Daphnia thet takes quite a bit of space .
I also make my own frozen food, I feed a cheap flake food , high protein granules. and catfish pellets,
Getting into live and homemade food seems essential to me if you wish to breed fish. I make my own frozen mixes, with ever adjusted recipes depending on my fish.
I culture wingless fruit flies for my hatchets and Epiplatys. Tetras go for them to. The wingless flies take time and space, and in spite of some tried and true tricks, end up smelly.
Daphnia is seasonal here. I feed it all summer, both the cultures, and my fish with it.
I feed a lot of freshly hatched artemia - cysts and new fish are my biggest expenses.
Mosquitoes and the odd bloodworm are also seasonal, cultured outdoors.
White worms are regulars. They also take attention and space.
It's very easy to spend more time on live food than on the creatures we feed them to. Many a reptile keeper has encountered that one, but it also affects fishkeepers. I use flake for some of my 'eat anything' fish, and on days when time just isn't there. I like a European brand we get here, Tropical, whose small granules are also excellent for bottom dwellers. I have some bulk bought cheap flake that does the job, and since I don't use enormous amounts of flake, I really like bug bites even if they are pricey for a set up as excessively large as mine.
I measure the quality of foods by how they affect egg production. That's an area where a fish breeder gets an advantage, by being able to see that. I found most of the expensive name brand flakes people say they can't get aren't missed. Egg production was always low with them. The only prepared foods that get even close to live food have high insect content. Tropical insect food and Fluval bug bites are my go tos. We used to get a pellet brand with soldier fly larvae, Northfin, as competition to bug bites, and it was good but made a coffee grinder essential because the pellets were big. I use a lot of chicken feed dried soldier fly larvae in my frozen paste foods.
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