Collection Growth Over Time!

[Vithaxton]

Hey gang! I was curious how much your collection grows each year! This is still my first year owning balls and I currently have 12 but I'm thinking of buying at least 20 more this year! Maybe even 40! My boyfriend pulled me aside the other day and told me to slow it down lol Although he's not complaining too much since we have a couple very rare money making morphs but do you guys expand your collections this much? I'll see a ball I just have to have and then I get it and I'm so happy! And then I'll see another one and I just have to have it because theres so many different projects I can do with it! Lol Im already about to start working on urban camos next year as well as panda pieds which is some advanced stuff that normally a 1 year hobbyist wouldn't have! So I feel like I'm not expanding too much if I'm producing rare snakes! Anyways I'm really curious to see all of your collections and how much they grow!

[Lizardlicks]

Started with 2 in 2015. Now have 11. I've been going the causal but steady pace!

[Vithaxton]

Started with 2 in 2015. Now have 11. I've been going the causal but steady pace!

Nice! That's still a pretty big collection too! But not unmanageable!


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[Lizardlicks]

I think it's juuuust about where I want it as far as purchasing new snakes. I'll be looking at prices on bamboo het clown babies next year, and once some one gets a line for stranger established on this side of the pond i'll grab that too, but I think most of my plans for expansion at this point are hold backs. First pairings start this fall!

[JodanOrNoDan]

Depends on what your end goal is and how much free time you have. It also depends on how fast you can sell. I would suggest getting through a breeding season before you buy too many more animals. Eventually you reach a point that managing the animals becomes work. I know my absolute limit is around 100 holdbacks as long as I have a full time job. I have 50 right now. I will probably produce around 100 babies this season. A couple of those clutches are being bred specifically for future projects. I will probably end up keeping around twenty from what I am making this year depending on the number of females that pop out. So you can see how the collection can grow very quickly without buying anything.

I would suggest that you narrow your scope on what you are attempting to create also. I am working almost the entire BEL complex, albino, lavender albino, yellow belly, gravel, spark, fire, pinstripe, spider, enchi, pastel and some mystery gene I have running around in my collection that I don't have a handle on. I am working too many genes in my opinion as a hobbyist. My advice in hindsight would be find the best of what you can afford and concentrate on producing quality animals.

[Lizardlicks]

All of my current snakes are planned for future pairs in mind. I have about the next 5 years more or less set in stone.

• Year one (this fall): Arcade (super pastel mojave het ghost and clown) to Strudel (cinnamon pinstripe) and Serket (lesser bee), aiming for a male mojave bumblebee hold back (Mituna).
• Year two: Riddle (pewter ghost) to Bean (pastel vanilla het ghost) hold back from that clutch if any will be determined by what that throws. May also repeating Serket/Arcade pairing or pair her with Riddle depending on if I got the mojave bumblebee hold back I was looking for. Pudding (banana het pied) will be paired to Eclair (enchi pied).
• Year three depends on hold backs and growth rates for everyone. I want to pair Mituna with Chiffon (enchi pastel calico) and Latula (GHI pastel yellow belly), Arcade to the het clown girls, hold back an enchi banana pied (if I get one) from Pudding and Eclair to pair to Strudel, and Riddle idk for that year. The ghost project isn't so much planned as fate seems to be steering me in that direction.
• Year four: banana enchi cinnamon het pied hold back goes back to Eclair hopefully to produce an enchi cinnamon banana pied, possibly a worlds first if no one beats me to it, but we'll see. I just WANT ONE. I'll start crossing around the clown and ghost and ghost and pied projects as well. I do plan to add a female axanthic and lavender both het for pied. If I can find an axanthic that's het for both pied and ghost, so much the better.
• Year five: evaluate current projects and hold backs, see what isn't working out or who's taking up space without contributing, and pare down.

We'll see how ideas evolve with what I want vs what they give me.

[ringorock]

Possessing a lot of animals and not having them yield capital returns is awful. I'm a rookie in ball breeding, so I am only going to have three pairs for the next few years unless my .1 mojave firefly produces some keepers this next season, but I'll try to sell the others away just to recoup some money invested.

Aside from my balls, I have four dogs, two cats, a rabbit, four goats, a huge sulcata, and about 50 chickens. I just got done building rat racks yesterday, so they're coming into the mix.

My wife wanted the goats to have milk, but their milk was awful, haha. We have two of the four sold. Rabbit was originally​ the wife's idea to breed meat rabbits. Although they bred well and fast, my wife wasn't good about caring for them. The offsprings all wilted away. I made her quit her rabbit and goat projects. She was overwhelmed, and my wallet hated buying feed and hay every week for no sight of return. 3/4 of my dogs were products of needing lgds for her livestock. We had pigs, too. I have since eaten them. Once the goats are all gone, I am reducing my dogs down to two, as only two have really been pets.

I've now repurposed most of that land to gardening area for the last three years, and we have commercial buyers for our local produce. That I can deal with.

I don't know how I got off on this rant. Ha! Btw, the chickens are worth it. The roosters are taken down as ground meat for sausages or food additive for our dogs. The hens are machine gun egg machines.

Were we talking about balls? Haha. Oops.

[Lizardlicks]

Oh man, I love goat milk, but they shine the best when you turn it into cheese! A raccoon got to our chickens and I only got 2 out of the 6 birds left, but the ones it missed where my best layer and my rooster haha!

Eventually want to add both fiber and meat rabbit, and meat chickens, but that will have to be for when we move out of the city.

[ringorock]

Oh man, I love goat milk, but they shine the best when you turn it into cheese! A raccoon got to our chickens and I only got 2 out of the 6 birds left, but the ones it missed where my best layer and my rooster haha!

Eventually want to add both fiber and meat rabbit, and meat chickens, but that will have to be for when we move out of the city.

Interestingly, my wife likes neither. The chickens are the best, because they are cheap and produce in both ways of eggs and meat. I love goat meat, but the goats are so intelligent and personable that I can't bring myself to hurt them.

With our garden, we also have an aquaponics system where we raise fish. Those are good eating!

[Oxylepy]

Mine doesn't. I have just recently started breeding and normally when I consider getting a new snake I realize that I would need to care for them and get a new rack system set up. Boom, no new snakes. I do intend on building a new rack, but until that time I have no increase in my collection