Handy Hints 2 : Joe Schill's Colum By Joe Schill
Mealworms: Larvae can be refrigerated. They will keep for quite a while until needed. The same applies to pupae. They can be 'thawed' to 25 C and fed potatoes, carrots, apples lettuce loaves and bread soaked in milk or beer. They should be kept in dog biscuits, chicken food (crumbles), oatmeal, bran, flour, broad crumbs and cornmeal with a little powdered yeast thrown in, which adds vitamins.
Clear Water: This can be achieved in a tank heavily planted with plants. Best are Vallisneria, Riccia and Hygrophilm. The more plants in the tank, the clearer the tank will be.
Elodea: Most species are not suited to the majority of aquariums because they need a DH (water hardness) of 7.5 - 10 with a great deal of calcium. These conditions are hard to duplicate in our tanks.
Winter maintainance of your fishpond: If you have a big pond, you should have a sump in the middle measuring 60 cm x 60 cm x 60 cm. The bigger the pond, the bigger the sump. This is the place that your Goldfish can go to hibernate if necessary.
You should clean your pond by the end of Autumn. This way your fish and plants are not disturbed in the Spring, when the Goldfish should be starting to spawn. They should commence spawning in September, but they won't spawn at all if the water temperature doesn't fall below 4 C. (Editor's Note: I must disagree with Joe here. A couple of years in a row I spawned the same fish that hadn't been outside in a pond since I bought them as inch-long juveniles. Their minimum water temperature wouldn't have fallen below 10 ' C, at the very least.) When the water is cold the fish won't eat at all. At 8 C they begin to feed, but eat little. You must feed your pond fish very little in the winter. The same thing can happen to so-
called tropicals too. I noticed with my White Clouds that they didn't eat below 10 C, and only recommenced feeding when the water temperature had risen to 13 C.
In my experience the Canberra Winters are not so bad as far as frost goes, my pond has only frozen twice in 10 years. It you have ice on the surface, smash it so that oxygen can enter the water. In open spaces you can expect ice sooner than in a sheltered garden.
Only top your pond up with water. Goldfish will tolerate acid or alkaline water, but cannot adjust suddenly from one extreme to the other.
DH (German degrees of Hardness): 1 degree DH is equal to 10mg of Calcium oxide per litre of water. Calcium and Magnesium produce Carbonate Hardness. Soft Water is in many cases good for your fish, but is no good for water plants.