This weekend, we took our dogs to a reservoir near us that we’ve visited several times in the past. It was a perfect fall day, with a nice breeze, pleasant temperature, and flowers blooming.

The most striking flower was a Bidens species that was just coming into bloom, with the sunny areas full of yellow inflorescences, while shaded areas were a few days from blooming.

In terms of aquatic plants, there was an abundance of Lindernia dubia, with its’ delicate purple flowers protruding from the stem.

Mixed in with the L. dubia, was a fair amount of Rotala ramosior, which was present in strong numbers, but maybe not quite as abundant as last year. It’s tooth-cup shaped flowers were hung tight to each node.

Our dogs enjoyed chasing the geese, which were really never in any danger as the geese smartly took flight several hundred yards before the dogs ever reached them.

The water was fairly low, exposing some great rock formations and river banks. Fall is a great time of year to visit this area!

Finally, our dogs ran wild, trampling underfoot thousands of perfectly good aquatic plants, and making a great outing for us!

The garden is winding down, with night-time temperatures inching toward the high forties, so I decided to start processing some of the Malabar Spinach that’s growing in several beds. Malabar spinach is a wonderful vining spinach (it’s not really in the spinach family) from India that’s used just like regular spinach. It’s a little bit thicker and has more cellular slime, so it’s best in soups and stir fries than as a fresh garden salad.

Before

This morning I picked roughly 16oz of spinach from the vines, pulled the tough rib from the larger leaves, and started a pot of water to boil for blanching. Above you can see that I had one large pile of leaves spanning about two of my cutting boards across and piled high.

After

After blanching, all of that reduced down to a small pile of green mush. I cut the pile in half, and froze in two 8oz packages. The whole process took about 15 minutes, and I’ll be able to continue using this year’s garden harvest into the winter!

I did some water changes this evening, and snapped a photo of my 33g as it stands today. The Elatine triandra is responding well to a trim that I did last week, and the rest of the plants are growing in well. I had to trim off a few leaves with black brush algae (BBA), since I got a little bit lax in my dosing over the past week or two, but it didn’t get out of control.

I’d love to hear any suggestions to refine the scape even more.

Here’s another video from my fish room, featuring my F1 Peruvian Angelfish and Apistogramma sp. ‘Breitbinden’.

I was enjoying my fish tanks this evening, and decided to shoot a short video of my 40G farm tank. The plants are crammed in there, but are healthy and pearling at the end of the day.

I have Oryzias woworae and Pelvicachromis taeniatus ‘Moliwe’ in the tank right now. I suspect that once the cichlids get bigger, I may need to find a more secure home for the O. woworae. Everyone’s getting along now, however.