Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Just a start




Took some pictures of the garden today. Will post these later.
The garden in July is truly spectacular. And my tadpole farm is hatching out frogs fast as a factory.
(The tadpoles are carnivores now and leave their veggies on the plate.)

For those who have not had the pleasure of raising a tadpole to be a frog here is what I do:
Early spring I take a kitchen strainer to a local pond and collect a hundred frog eggs/tadpoles. Place them in a large plastic bucket (5 gal) and feed them frozen lettuce. I add some pond weed to help keep the water fresh but still change the water with de-chlorinated water every two weeks. Try to find and add some guppies to eat the mosquito larvae. The guppies will thrive too and will not hurt the tadpoles but do not add big fish as these will eat your tadpoles. Once some of the tadpoles start to grow legs it is time to add some protein to their diet. Catfood from a can or ground meat or some left over sirloin steak or chicken - very small quantities though! Should fit on your pinky finger nail.
Be sure to put a chunk of wood with bark on sticking into the bucket so the frogs can climb out otherwise they will drown in the bucket since they cannot climb up the plastic walls. Once the tadpoles lose their tails they do not seem to know how to swim and cannot swim up to sit on a floating log, so the log must extend right to the bottom of the bucket.
Black tadpoles will turn into frogs while the light green spotted tadpoles turn into toads.

For a view of the tadpole life cycle click here.

No comments:

Post a Comment