Beyond Gardening!

A short break from gardening!

Balloon Molly
This is a cute fish with rounded, large belly. 

This little mama is pregnant. Look at the rounded belly. We were waiting almost very patiently for the babies to appear!

 Can you see the baby's tail coming out from the mother?  I actually waited and wanted to video the birthing, waited for more than half an hour and finally gave up, as I really had to go out at that time. When I came back more two hours later, she has already given birth to a few babies! But sadly, this mama fish died the next day, and she's the prettiest mama in the aquarium!

See the two little fishes following closely behind? They love to do this, I guess it's one their natural habits. These two are siblings! The are about 3 months old. The rest of their siblings died, along with their mother.

This cute little yellow molly is another little mama. She gave birth to more than 20 baby fish about 2 weeks ago. She seems to be doing well.

These are some of her babies

This is one mighty proud male fish.  He likes to spread out his top fins when pursuing the female, male ego? I don't see other male fish doing this! 

 Baby fish gets to hide in little caves and holes. The bigger fish, even their own mother are known to eat their young, and I have seen this before.  My hubby and myself witness the birthing of the babies a couple of months back and saw the mother ate one of her young just minutes after birth! Both of us are speechless at that very moment! But that is nature.  

There are four of this little fish with the black stripe, all siblings.  They are about 3 weeks old. 

Our little aquarium! Watching the cute little antics and habits of these little fishes can have a calming effect. They always seems to know the feeding time, they will get very excited and swam to the top waiting for the food when its time for feeding.  The lovely green plant is from our own bigger plant (this will be a separate post). It can last for at least 4 months, sometimes even longer,  in the aquarium. 

Beyond Gardening shall continue.... in due time!

Wordless Wednesday

Rangoon Creeper

Quisqualis Indica is also known as Rangoon Creeper or Chinese Honeysuckle.  It is a vine with red cluster flowers, the colours varies from white to pink to red, and is very fragrant.  This plant can be found in Philippines, India and Malaysia and is mainly used for traditional medicine. The roots, flowers, leaves, seeds and fruits, can be used to treat various ailments such as diarrhea and rheumatism.  

This is a perennial climber plant which needs a wall or fence to climb.  I plant this in a pot and place it at my front porch where it gets full sun. This plant needs a lot of water especially when it is very hot, just like today, I need to water it twice.  The flowers are really fragrant, almost similar to our local jasmine.  When it starts to flower, the whole plant will be full of blooms, like it is blooming now. It is indeed beautiful when this happens! My plant is about 6 ft high but it is not very big.  Usually after the flowers faded off, most of the leaves will turn to yellow and will soon drop off too. (Just like autumn, ya??). I will then prune and cut off the dead wilted branches and soon new leaves will grow, followed soon after by another batch of blooms.  Anyone of you have this plant?  Does this happen to your rangoon creeper?  A few of the houses in my neighbourhood grew this plant on the ground, their plant is so much bigger and lush!  

This rangoon creeper of mine has faithfully blooms thousands of flowers these past eight years of so. Even though it is not big in size, but it makes its presence known each time it blooms.