New Products In

At last the new granules are in & starting to go out. We were pleased our Astax granule manufacturer made these up for us. The Spirulina granule is going to be a good addition to our feed range & will be a great feed for veggie fish.
Available in 2 sizes - 5,8 & 12.







Cichlid granule is available in 2 grades of 1.2mm & 3mm. This is specially formulated for non veggie Cichlids with all the benefits of best growth rates used in the farming & rearing of Tilapia. This is a specialised granule for ornamental fish.







Discus Granule looks really rich. Although I don't have any Discus at the moment I will be sending out some samples to Discus breeders for tests. I have fed it to wild Corydoras & Brochis & they love it so it proves it's attractivenes to fish. Angelfish will also benefit from this diet.
Available in 2 sizes 1.2mm & 3mm






We have standardised the prices on these new granules & we can now offer any mix to make up 300g, 500g & 1kg amounts. Just drop us an e-mail after clicking the mixed grade link with what you need & we will post out to you.

The Latest News

It's been awhile since I wrote something here. Last time we were getting problems with the site crashing. Since then we have improved our bandwidth & transferred one of my bigger sites on Killifish to an American server which releases a big amount of space. Hopefully crashes will be a thing of the past.
Loads of new imports continue to come in. New lines have been added to the site including the new wafers as Spirulina & a fish/beefheart blend. These are made up by a small operator & not a mass produced item.
Also new is the Cichlid floating mini sticks. These look really rich & I have sent some samples out for breeders to try out.
We have them as a red form or the green Spirulina. We have been missing a good quality floating stick. They should also prove very useful to our fancy goldfish customers.






We continue to search for new products & one of our suppliers who makes the very popular Astax crumb now informs us they can make up for us a Spirulina crumb. The specs look really good on this & we can't wait to get some in. As with the Red Astax we will have various sized granules to add to our list.
Also available will be a specialised Cichlid granule & a Discus granule.
Hopefully all these will be in stock in a couple of weeks.

Site Down

The website crashed for 4 days last weekend. We have 3 sites on the server & despite increasing to maximum allowable bandwidth to prevent this we went over & the sites crashed.
We have reluctantly decided to take the Killifish site offline to make more bandwidth available for the TA site. This should stop this happening in the future.
We apologise for inconvenience during the site being offline.
The Killifish site will be back in the near future as we are looking at hosting on another server to keep it seperate.

Spirulina Flake - We have negotiated our Spirulina flake to be made in larger flake sizes. Some customers have asked if this is possible. The flake will now be taken off the machine without reducing to usual flake size. This is easily reduced to flake sizes you prefer.
We really sell a lot of this flake & it's always produced freshly on our order & not taken from stock.

Stick Feeds - The biggest shipment of sticks we have ever brought in is on the way over. We had to increase order weight as it is proving extremely popular now with 50% of the earthworm stick already sold from this shipment.
As you may be aware we get these made up from a single source who produces small quantities. The machine producing these sticks recently broke down & a brand new machine had to be bought. This has not been cheap & consequently the cost to us has risen slightly. We did not put the price up on the last rise to us but this time had to increase slightly.
New floating sticks of Spirulina & another of Beef Heart is currently coming in which fills a gap in our stick feeds.
Wafers - New wafers of Spirulina & another of Beef Heart are on the way over also. Our customers asked us to source a good supply which we have done.

The driving agency part of the business has been extremely busy lately. Postage has been a problem but I now have someone to post daily so this sorts out a big headache.
This side of the business provides a lot of income for the fish side. We are currently working on a long overdue repackaging of our granule, brine shrimp, stick etc range in foil pouches. These will be designed to look good on retailers shelves.
More flakes will be packed in our tubs too.
The black flake is due to come in again soon. This has proved a great food for livebearers & guppies in particular.

Holiday

Every year I say I will never shut down for a full week again & go off with the bucket & spade to Malta & every year I still do it. Coming back is always the same thing with loads of orders & correspondance to clear. This year was extremely busy & it took 2 days to clear all orders. As always all orders were in the post as fast as possible & this year all were away on Monday.
Orders on Monday were also heavy but will be in the post on Tuesday morning.
We try to work a 'just in time' policy of bringing in small quantities freshly made food & now many feeds are needing to be made up with our suppliers. A lot of food from all over the world will be coming in shortly.
The BCA will be holding a meeting & auction in Redditch (same venue as our charity auctions) on 26th September & we will have a stand there on the day to show our products off.

Indian Almond Leaves

It's amazing how many problems crop up with suppliers. We sell a lot of Indian Almond leaves. Some customers buy them 100-500 at a time. We keep a decent stock but were caught out recently by a series of big orders & had to order more.
Problem was - the monsoon period had just started. This is an extract from the supplier which brings home the problems experienced in getting these leaves at this time of year -

'We are really sorry for the delay..but we have had several really bad tropical storms hit our village ( start of the rainy season )...2 times we have been totally washed out...both times the heavy winds blew the covers off the leaves which we had on them to protect them from the wind and rain while we where drying them...each time the leaves where either blown away or where totally waterlogged that we had to bin them...we have been busy re-pressing and drying more and are just waiting for them to dry so we can brush them before shipping'..

Our policy is not to store big quantities of anything in favour of keeping stock fresh so some times of the year we at the mercy of mother nature.

Updates

The charity auction always takes up a lot of time before & after the event but it's always worth it when you see how much money was raised for our 3 main charities. If you haven't seen the results page yet please click the link in the yellow box top right corner of the home page.
I'm amazed how big this event is becoming. It attracts lots of the UK's finest breeders & I think is a fantastic day out & a chance to meet fellow fishkeepers & expert breeders alike.

Decapsulated Brine Shrimp now back in stock. This took a little time to get in due to processing at the facility. It's always hit & miss with this item which can come in with shell & rubbish. Thankfully after many years of working with this we have found some good people to deal with & this batch is very clean & shell free.
We have moved over 40 kg this week alone so it must be good to get these kind of repeat orders.

New Life Spectrum - At last the new range is in stock & cart buttons are now on the site. It's a really big range of products now but we are filling up with the range again so things will soon be back to the way it was before they moved premises.


Getting more work on the haulage side of the business which does cause a slight delay in posting in some cases due to early morning starts. Most orders are being sent by last post or next day.
This work brings in extra finance so we can bring in these expensive overseas imports & find new products for our customers.

Orders have been rising & new customers including Universities & professonal breeders have been placing orders.

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.....