Charity Auction

For 10 years now I have been involved in the Midland Charity Auction. To start with we didn't want to make it a commercial thing where someone made a profit from it. It's grown from making a few quid to generating hundreds of pounds each auction. Now we can say we have generated a few thousand pounds for various charities.
I don't think any other fish auction does this. It takes an army of people to help put these events on & I hope I can name them in the post auction report.
Conservation has always been close to my heart in fishkeeping. This year one of the old guard is packing up due to the inevitable advancing years & health issues. It's a sad fact that these people with a huge amount of experience need to pass things on to a younger set of enthusiasts but maybe they are not coming forward..
I know & fear that many of these collections will now die out in years to come.
With so many new collections now coming in conservation becomes very hard.

It is of course impossible to conserve everything in captivity. Let's hope we can leave nature to look after its own & not let our greed for land or resourse domination take over.....

Holiday

Back from holiday to a load of orders & e-mail work but all have been posted & replied to on the first day back. Didn't think I could get all the orders out but just managed it.
Back to normal again.....

Updates..

It's been a while since the last blog so I thought this would show I'm still here -
Orders have been really heavy over the past few weeks especially since Spectrum came in. Initially we only ordered the Cichlid Formula & the new Thera A 2mm granule. This has been due to the high demand for these items & our wish to get in a large stock to keep customers from waiting for new shipments.
We have been sending out buckets of 2.2kg Cichlid Formula virtually daily. The new 600g tubs believe it or not are almost sold out & a new order had to be placed. Last year it was the 300g tubs which were selling out - now customers want the larger tubs. It's a true measure of how good the food is.

As many of you know the business is split between mail order fish foods & my one man HGV driving agency. This has become very busy in itself & I have found myself working from 4am to midnight some days to keep up with all the work. In some cases I have not been home in time to get orders in the post & they have been delayed 24 hours longer than normal. For this I apologise but under the circumstances we are coping very well.
The money generated from this driving agency side is being ploughed back into getting bigger stocks in where things like sticks regularly go out of stock. Also expanding into new foods we have wanted to include on the site becomes a lot nearer happening.
Sales of brine shrimp eggs continue to grow. In one week we sold 185 x 550g pouches. A lot of farms now buy from us.

Our Midland charity auction is fast approaching for June 6th. Please see the site for regular updates. The photo was taken today. Swans & Coots are nesting on the pool.