Welcome to the forum! Sounds like you are off to a great start educating yourself about the needs of these wonderful creatures.

We use aspen and haven't found it a problem feeding directly on it in each snake's enclosure. Many folks here use a lot of different feeding approaches as far as whether they feed in the enclosure or out of it, what type of substrate they have chosen, what manner of prey they offer and how they offer it. Each have their pro's and con's and are generally a pretty individual choice. As long as what you choose works for you and is helping you achieve the goal of a consistently eating and growing snake, you're on the right track as far as I'm concerned.

We were also concerned with ingestion of small amounts of aspen when some of the snakes were smaller so just popped in a pad of newspaper over the aspen during feeding night. We don't bother with it anymore as all of our snakes are of good size and we've noted that a dry prey doesn't seem to pick up much aspen (as opposed to one that might have gotten damp when being warmed up in water....darn ziplocs do occasionally have holes!)


~~Joanna~~