Archive for July, 2009

Summer Goodness – Cilantro

July 22nd, 2009

Since it’s summer, I’ve been keeping a vegetable garden growing all sorts of things. One of the things I’m growing is cilantro & my cilantros are going crazy! They keep going to seed every week & I have to keep trimming them. That’s surely a good thing for the hamsters :-)

DH cilantro
Daddy Hamster (above) & Baby Hamster (below) enjoying freshly picked cilantro

BH cilantro

To see how the garden has progressed throughout the summer, see here.

ps: the chinchillas also like cilantros, but they like them slightly crispy & dry.

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Bugs

July 12th, 2009

in the Chinchilla Food!

This is the second time it has happened to me:
I normally buy Mazuri pellets from an online store (which will remain unnamed). Mazuri pellets only come in 2.5-lb or 25-lb packagings. Obviously 2.5 lbs is too little to buy at a time, but 25 lbs is too much. The online supplier I buy Mazuri from sells 10 lbs, so that’s what I normally buy. My first time, after a couple of months of storing the pellets in an airtight resealable plastic bag, I discover these little tiny bugs about the same size as the pellet powder (almost the same color as the pellets, too). Because I knew that I couldn’t possibly pick at every little bug, I threw away the rest of the pellets & bought another 10 lbs of Mazuri from the same supplier. This time, I stored the pellets in a plastic tupperware. Same thing happened again, the same tiny bugs were found in the pellets!

I’m thinking that the bugs I found were mites. I highly doubt that they come from my apartment (I only see these bugs in the pellets & not anywhere else around my apartment, plus I don’t find myself itching). I’m thinking, since the supplier must have split the pellets that I buy from the original 25-lb packaging, if he had carelessly stored the rest, bugs could have access to the rest of the pellets supply.

ps: while I’m waiting for the newly ordered Mazuri to arrive (from a different supplier, of course), I temporarily replaced the chinchilla food with another brand. They don’t even want to touch it! These chinchillas think they’re too good to be fed inferior pellets (Mazuri has the highest protein content of 20% in chinchilla pellets that I know of, whereas commercial brands found in petstores contain 14-18% of protein).

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When It’s Hot ..

July 2nd, 2009

This is what the chinchillas do:

Tubby cooling on tileTubby cooling himself off during playtime by lying flat on the terracotta tiles

Winnie cooling on cage barsWinnie cooling himself off after playtime by lying flat against the cool cage bars
Winnie’s ears turn bright pink whenever he’s hot :-)

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