Preparing Your Own Home made Fish Food

Home made Fish Food Basics

              Making home-made food for your pond fish is fairly easy to do. The process does not require special skills or an overwhelming amount of work. It is simply a matter of knowing what you need to make the food and how to go about doing it.


Preparation

              When you make homemade fish food, you will first need to gather the proper ingredients. This will ensure that you make the most nutritious food possible for your fish.

             You can make your own supplement for general fish feeding that is high in DL-methionine (an important amino acid in fish nutrition); Start with whole salmon which is an excellent source of carotene for color (frozen or even canned works), frozen peas, hard boiled egg, frozen or FD brine shrimp, duck weed or spiulina powder, and fish oil (cod liver oil works fine). Blend this mixture then add corn starch

to the paste for dehydration. Spread this paste on small strips of foil (or even wax paper if your dehydrator does not get to hot). Make sure you leave room for air circulation.

Tips

• For a frozen food, substitute the corn starch with unflavored gelatin powder.

• For goldfish and koi, add wheat germ powder. Use this formula for African Cichlids, except delete the wheat germ.

• For more carnivorous fish increase the whole fish and decrease the spirulina powder or duckweed. Calamari (squid) can be added too for carnivorous fish, but make sure that all the ink is removed from whole squid.Use this formula for Discus.

• For spirulina powder, Spirulina One Flake can be substituted, but since this already a complete diet for many fish, you can double the amount of this and decrease other ingredients by comparable amounts.

Silicon Concentrate

Selcon Concentrate contains omega-3 HUFA, vitamin B12 and pure stabilized vitamin C. Highly concentrated, it is ideal for enriching rotifers and Artemia. It is excellent for soaking freeze-dried foods. Boosts the nutritional value of live brine shrimp.

Home made food with Silicon Concentrate

Go to the FISH MARKET where you would buy FRESH FISH for your family to eat and purchase the following: 1 or 2 uncooked shrimp A few fresh clams (in the shell) Scraps of fish fillet (tuna, cod, salmon, etc.) 1 Squid, cleaned but not cooked A few scallops

Remove the shrimp and clams from their shells and pat the meat dry on a paper towel. Wrap each shrimp and each clam with plastic wrap and put in freezer overnight. Wrap each of the remaining ingredients individually with plastic wrap and freeze overnight.               The next day, carefully cut each frozen piece by using a serrated bread knife; trying to make thin slices, the approximate thickness of a nickel. Continue to chop these small frozen slices to the size of a grain of rice. Small pieces of fish will cut best when frozen. Put all of the chopped pieces into a small bowl and add enough Selcon Concentrate (shake first) to give the mixture a consistency similar to cooked oatmeal.              You can add a few scoops of Masago, which is the roe of Capelin or Smelt, commonly used by Japanese to make Sushi. The eggs are colored bright orange, approximately 1 mm in diameter and relished by all of the tank inhabitants. The mixture can now be thinly spread onto a sheet of plastic wrap and frozen. Miniature ice cube trays or empty cube packs work very well also. Make small batches of this recipe and make it frequently.

If you are looking for Budget Home Made fish food you can try the following.

A mixture of ton, shrimp, spinach, clams, and creel is most often used for feeding fish. Mix these ingredients and freeze them in an ice cube tray. As a result, you have blocks of food that are ready for your fish. When it is time to feed your pond fish, take a frozen cube out of the tray and drop it into the pond. Your fish will be happy and healthy, and you will reap the financial savings that come with this homemade alternative to traditional pond fish food.

Here are basic percentages, please note that you can change these percentages to suit your fish food requirements:
	BASIC	GOLDFISH	CARNIVOURE
Whole Salmon:	25%	20%	30%
Peas:	25%	25%	15%
Egg:	20%	15%	25%
Brine shrimp:	15%	15%	15%
Spirulina Powder:	10%	15%	5%
Wheat Germ:	0%	5%	0%
Squid:	0%	0%	5%
Fish Oil:	2%	2%	2%
Corn Starch or Gelatin: 3% 3%	3%	3%	3%

                     There are many different foods on the market whilst variety is key, it’s still vital to choose carefully.

Flake foods

                    Flake foods are a mixture of food sources, normally with additional vitamins and minerals, which provides a good balanced diet. It is possible to feed only flake food and still provide all the basic nutritional requirements of most fish. In most cases, flake food will form the main diet of your fish and additional foods can be used as supplementary feeds. There are a number of different brands of flake food available and some are noticeably better quality than others. It is normally best to choose a well-known brand and not a cheaper alternative.

Live foods

                   Some live foods can be made or kept at home, which can significantly reduce the cost. Earthworms are excellent meaty foods for predatory fish. Most large fish are predatory. Brine shrimp can be easily hatched and raised in a more controlled and sterile manner through the use of hatching kits, available from most aquatic retailers Bloodworm, daphnia, Cyclops and brine shrimp are all popular live foods and are available from many retailers. These foods are normally sold in small amounts and will only last for a few days before they start to die. If they are kept in a cool environment, such as in a fridge, they may last a few days longer. Most fish will noticeably enjoy live foods and they are a good source of protein, which is used primarily for growth and repair. Live foods can be fed as a supplement to a main diet or as a 'treat' food. Before purchasing live foods it is worth checking to see which days your retailer receives deliveries, that way you can obtain fresher food, which can be kept for longer.

Frozen foods

                  There are a number of different frozen foods available and these are also normally high in protein and make a good supplemental food. Bloodworm, daphnia, and brineshrimp are ideal for smaller fish and foods such as mussels, cockles, shrimp and lancefish are available for larger fish. Foods that are higher in protein content (live foods, frozen foods & growth foods) also result in higher amounts of waste in the form of ammonia and nitrites. For this reason, they should not be used as a main diet but as additional feeds two or three times a week.

Sinking foods

                   Pellet and tablet or wafer foods are available which are designed to sink to the aquarium floor. These types of food are ideal for bottom feeding fish and catfish. Care should be taken when feeding sinking foods, as it is easy to overfeed without knowing how much has been eaten and how much has found its way into the substrate. To avoid this, sinking foods should only be fed every other day and placed in a visible area where any excesses can be removed after around an hour.

                       " Variation in diet is excellent for your fishes digestive and immune systems, and also allows you to tailor diets to individual or groups of fish. Predatory species can be given more meaty food, opportunist feeders can be fed small daphnia and brine shrimp, and grazers can be given fruits and vegetables."