Newbie still trying to figure things out...

[GrowingaBeard]

So we've had Blaze for almost a month now...so far so good overall.

He's eating us out of house and home...he likes phoenix worms, but LOVES crickets. We just got our second box of 500 crickets in the mail, wow! Did much better "handling" the transfer of crickets from shipping box to cricket tub this time, too, LOL... only lost maybe a dozen escapees. He eats a little bit of salad - funny how picky he is about it, though. Some days it looks totally untouched, but I've seen him eat a couple bites here and there.

He seems content - he is halfway through his first shed since we've had him...tail and face and three legs are done, gorgeous new rust-orange scales! Still needs to shed his head and back...does the belly shed too? Can't tell. He was completely miserable the first day of the shed, but baths have helped and he feels much better now. His nails are getting sharp...could I file them a little instead of clipping? Wonder if he'd let me...

He sometimes likes to be held, sometimes not. Last night he surprised me and took a giant leap out of my hands onto the rug and scared the &*(% out of us! He seemed fine after the approx. 3-foot jump, but yikes! When he landed he wobbled for a few seconds then was fine. I sat on the floor with him after that to prevent more dramatic feats, as he's apparently fearless. Now to keep the cat hair out of his mouth - geez he licks everything and we have three cats (one of which is obsessed with Blaze and his crickets...cat has to be banished from the house when we have Blaze out and about).

A few questions have come up as we figure out how to raise this little guy...

1. Tank cleaning. How? Its a 40B glass tank, not something we can easily rinse once I wash it - its big, glass, and heavy! Tips? Secrets? All I've been doing so far is taking everything out once a week or so, and wiping the whole inside with a wet rag then drying with paper towel. I surely should be sanitizing it more, though, right? How?

2. Substrate. I need a new option. We have carpet (wrong size so only covers part of the floor) with paper towels filling in the blank areas. Its fine, except the carpet gets so dirty so fast...he poops at least once, sometimes, twice a day, and always on the carpet, LOL. When I take the carpet out to clean it, we use paper towels in the meantime but this seems very wasteful....looking into getting tile, but some questions about that - do tiles come in precut sizes that would fit the full tank floor? I guess I can do some measurements at Home Depot. Don't crickets/worms find hiding places between the tiles? He likes to dig at bedtime but he's way too small for sand, I think. When we have the floor lined in paper towels he often see him tucking himself in sleeping underneath the paper towels on the bare glass, LOL.

3. Is there a way to keep fresh greens fresh longer? Seems they go bad before we can use even half, since they come in such big bunches at the store. Mustard greens are his favorite, but when those start to go bad in the fridge, PHEW!! They stink so bad! Escarole seems to last a little longer, thankfully. He wouldn't touch collard greens that I've seen, and is only so-so about cilantro (which spoils really fast too). Can you freeze any of these? Do they lose health benefits by doing so?

 

[CooperDragon]

I'm glad things are going smoothly. With crickets I usually cut one of the small sides of the box off along the edges with a box cutter, then pull the piece off and pull the egg crates out into the cricket tank, then shake the rest of the crickets out. I can usually do this without losing many crickets (sometimes a couple but I can catch them).


For tank cleaning I use a mixture of vinegar and water in a spray bottle (1/3 to 1/2 vinegar or so, it's a rough estimate). After taking everything out, I spray everything down and let it sit for a few minutes. Then I wipe it down with a dry paper towel, then rinse by wiping everything down with a wet towel (just water) then dry again with a paper towel. It's not as thorough as some of the steam cleaning solutions folks on here use, but it works for basic routine cleaning. There are a lot of different thoughts on this one, and this is just what I do. It's not the final word for sure.

The tile substrate is what I use and it works well. I measured the tank and had 3 sets of 2 ceramic tiles cut at Lowes to fit the spec. They're easy to clean and if you have a few sets you can just drop new tiles in as needed while you clean the dirty ones. You can use the same vinegar/water method to clean the tiles. If you want to disinfect them further you can bake them in the oven for a bit (20min at 350 or so should do the job nicely). I didn't have problems with crickets getting under the tiles but they would sometimes congregate on the sides where I had small gaps for my fingers to be able to pull the tiles up. I would just point the crickets out and Coop could get his tongue down and pick them up easily. I could usually scare them out with a piece of paper too. It really wasn't an issue. You get the added benefit of having the tile keep the toenails filed. You could pick up a sleep sack or something similar if he likes to sleep in something soft. Coop just slept on his hammock and was happy with that.


I usually picked up greens once a week or so. I'd get whatever was fresh looking at the store and matched something on the list from beautifuldragons. His favorite was turnip greens. After 5 days or so if the greens started to look bad I'd throw them in a salad and eat them myself or with kale I'd make kale chips - that works better with older kale anyway. For longer storage I've had success with putting small bunches in a ziploc wrapped in paper towels. It's more work to start but it makes it easy to pull the small pieces out of the bag and feed them. Either way I never really kept the greens more than a week or so. Having to buy new stuff helped me rotate the selection and it was never really very expensive to do.

 

[Drache613]

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