Welcome to "The Niblet", two quirky exotic animal breeders sharing a taste of the farm life. In this issue we're discussing Exo-Terra cages, our 2007 garden plans, delicious mice, and your questions.

We hope you enjoy this issue, and welcome your thoughts and suggestions. If you have an idea for something you'd like to see here in the future just hit reply and let us know. .

All the best,

Ross Lasley	Amy Lasley

Exo-Terra Green Tree Python Cages

Unless you are handy with hot glue and a drill, it really hasn't been possible to walk into a store and buy a "ready to go" Green Tree Python cage. Hagen changed all that when they introduced the Exo-Terra, a glass terrarium that is very well designed and quite a bargain.

This cage was at first viewed with some suspicion by the Green Tree Python community and the low price was part of the reason for that - we bought one late last summer just to see if it worked. It does, and then some.

They range from 12" cubes to almost 24" cubes but typically Green Tree Python folks go for the PT-2605 Exo-Terra which is 18" x 18" x 18".

The street price on this unit is about $75 and it includes the fake rock styrofoam background. Hagen products are carried by all major pet stores and the big box places like Petsmart have these units in stock.

Outfitting this cage is lots of fun and there are many options and ways to do it.

Click here to learn how.

Spruce Nubble Farm Mice are Delicious!

As we've said before - you are what you eat. Here at Spruce Nubble Farm we raise all of our rodents in our barn using lab tubs and Mazuri rodent chow.

It isn't hard to raise your own mice and our friends over at Big Apple Herpetological have asked us to write an article about breeding rodents for their website. It is being edited now but once it is up at the Big Apple web site we'll announce it here along with a coupon exclusively for Niblet Readers.

Anyway, this week we had planned to feed the neonates and the adults on Wednesday night. So we got 100 assorted pinkies out of the freezer along with a few dozen mice and a couple of small rats. As usual we placed them in tubs in bathroom near the rack room downstairs and settled in to watch TV for a few hours while they thawed. Around 10:30 it was time to float the rodents in warm water so I went to go do the chore.

"Amy, where'd you put the rodents?", I called out
"Right there by the tub as usual", she replied
"Not here", I said
"Whaaat ?", she replied

Well - it turns out our big dog Jack had taken a journey to the bathroom earlier in the evening and discovered just how delicious pinkies can be. He ate almost every rodent in sght and we did the best we could to not laugh while telling him "Bad Dog".

Just further proof of how delicious a home grown rodent can be!

April Showers?? Not if it's snow!

As this issue goes out, we have just received another 10 inches of snow. Add this to the 2 feet that fell a week ago, and you have a lot of really grumpy gardeners with piles of seeds and no place to put them.

However, the ever-hopeful-exotic-animal-farmers here at Spruce Nubble Farm have decided not to let the weather get them down. A snowy spring is just another opportunity to get your garden plan organized.

A garden plan can be as simple as sketching out the different beds in your garden and writing in what was planted there. This year we moved up from mere scraps of paper, to scraps of paper taped to a scrap of paneling.

So why should you create a garden plan every year? Besides making you feel like you're working on the garden when you can't actually "do" anything in the garden, a garden plan is the primary tool you'll need to track crop rotations.

Up until recently, we never really addressed the whole issue of crop rotation either, but these days we depend on our garden a lot more than the grocery store, to stock our pantry. Our thinking is why not? Why not give the plants in your garden every chance to thrive. The Old Timers knew the benefits of rotating crops every year - and those Old Timers were usually right..

Your Questions

There is nothing we like quite as much as questions from our customers. If you have any questions about animals please feel free to email us. We may feature your question in a future edition of the Niblet.

Recently we received this question:

Can the two green pythons live together for their childhood, or do they need separate tanks?

Keeping multiple snakes in one enclosure is really tricky but possible - it is much easier to just have two enclosures. The big issue is feeding time and the "typical" disaster is when you feed one animal and it takes a prey item and the other snake comes along and grabs the other end of the same prey time - two snakes, one mouse, bad news. The other thing about keeping them together is that they must be kept separate for breeding - I suppose it makes sense but if they have a boy around all the time the girls just don't get interested in copulating. (insert your favorite joke about your boyfriend here).

When it comes to keeping multiple Green Tree Pythons in one cage - don't do it.