Water-Garden

We tried to create a container-water-garden earlier this year with money plants and two swordtail fishes. Unfortunately, we failed miserably. We started to look around for proper aquatic plant, and we narrowed down to water hyacinth. It was ridiculously priced at a shop that we saw, something in the range of RM30 to RM50. It's afterall a water plant that is considered as a pest plant at the down under, the hobbit land and the states.

We sort of just lay low and kept the idea at the back of our mind, and continue our weekend nursery visits. We had been hoping to find it or something suitable to replace it.  

And, lucky us! We found a big pot for a nice price (RM18) along the stretch of Sungai Buloh. We were over the moon when we saw it!

The hyacinth bloomed about five days later, and the bloom lasted only for a day. Pretty things don't last...but still it was beautiful while it lasted. 

We wanted to get swordtail fish for the pot in the house. The bright orange goes extremely well with the green, but swordtail was out of stock in all those aquariums that we went to. When our friends finally bought a pair for us, they did not last for more than two days... One jumped out of the pot and died, the other just died. 

We managed to find some pretty guppies. They seemed to adapt rather quickly and we decided to stick to guppies for future pots. They somehow seem pretty happy with the aquatic-plant environment. 

We ended with two pots, one in the house and the other in the car porch. We decided to use the one in the car porch to cultivate more hyacinth, hence we left the yellow soil in the pot. According to the nursery, yellow soil aids water hyacinth's growth. We gotten a bigger pot and another three pairs of guppies for that. 

The pot in the house is without soil for aesthetics reason. We have two pairs of guppies in it, and it would help to eliminate the possibility of the breeding of mozzies.  

Hubby has a theory; he said the guppies' would develop nicer scale colour if the guppies have the chance to be in the sun. Well... the guppies in the pond do look nicer. So, I have been bringing it out to the back yard for sun almost daily. 

Check out the air bubbles between the roots! Water hyacinth has pretty purplish roots, and with the air bubbles, they look rather exquisite :)

One of the female guppies seems to be pregnant. Her tummy is bulging. We are getting ready another pot for the adult fishes so that they won't have the chance eat up all the babies when they are here. 

It's pretty therapeutic to watch them swim around. Kind of good to know that they would not die of hunger if we are back in Batu or away for holidays :)

Update @ 28 Sep 2016: 
This is an update to share where we got our water hyacinth. For easy reference, I will call the nursery where I got my water hyacinth as the water-hyacinth nursery. I didn't note the shop name of the watery-hyacinth nursery, but I got a picture of the nursery that's next to it:

This is NOT the water-hyacinth nursery, this is the nursery on the immediate left of it.

The water-hyacinth nursery is on the immediate right side of this nursery in the picture. The address that waze gave us is "Jalan BRP 7/1, Sungai Buloh, Selangor". 

We last visited the water-hyacinth nursery about 6 to 8 months ago. It was still there and we still saw water hyacinth around. There were occasions when we went and they did not have stock.