How often you guys get a new ball python

[nikkubus]

My gf told me to wait also, but what I thought is, i just bought 1 male 1 female, need to wait 2 to 3 years before i can actually breed them, after this 3 years, i will only get 1 clutch of egg, thats why i am thinking, should i get another female, so that after 3 years, i can actually have 2 clutches of eggs(if i able to breed them successfully). Before I get into ball python, I had done my research that some ball pythons will fast for a certain period once they reach maturity and other common issue met by ball python keepers and breeders.

anyhow, thanks for ur advice. I will think twice before getting the GHI Pastel

If you are heavily considering breeding, that's even more reason to slow down. If you do not take some time to really learn about the genetics before you start buying more snakes, you are going to kick yourself later. If you just start buying snakes that you like the look of, when it comes time to breed, you are not going to have great success, and then when you finally do understand which types of morphs you should be pairing, all your space will be filled and you can't get which ones you need to make your projects work how you want. 95% of the time, people that decide to breed don't regret not purchasing snakes earlier, they regret not purchasing the RIGHT snakes and having a large collection of snakes they will never breed because something else makes a lot more sense to meeting their goals.

If you really, really, really want more right now, get all females. It's still going to limit you in the long run, but at least you CAN get one or two expensive powerhouse males later on and still get really cool babies no matter what the females are. You can get a male from hatchling to breeding weight pretty darn quickly without sacrificing health if you do it correctly. Females take a lot longer to hit safe breeding size. I would still limit purchases of even females as much as you can stomach.

I don't have any kind of limit on how often I buy snakes, but I do have some rules for myself. I have big spreadsheet full of project ideas, and have the rough order planned out for what I will be buying, including equipment. Things sit on that list for a bare minimum of a year before I take the plunge so I have to time really think things through and decide if I like some other project better. Some snakes might jump from middle of the list to the front if I find a really good deal (like an adult proven female for sale with the genes I want for the roughly the same price as a hatchling for example). I keep a pretty decent amount of money set aside for rare snakes that are hard to find and deals, which is how I was able to cough up the money for my pure Kalatoa retics when Andrew decided to put a 1.1 pair of holdbacks up for sale.