Feeding schedules
 

At the moment I'm on one feed a day, and have a few questions about this etc.

1/ should I increase this?
2/ I try to provided as varied a diet as I can but was interested to see what some of your weekly feeding schedules looked like.

At the moment there is 6 rosey tetra, 2 dwarf neon blue gouramis and 6 polkadot loaches in the tank.

Fry require multiple feedings each day as they are growing/developing fast. But mature fish of most species can manage with one or less. And one must remember than in an established planted tank there will be quite a lot of live food invisible to us but the fish will eat it.

I feed once daily, and miss one and sometimes two days each week; one miss is always the water change day as fish should not be fed prior to any disturbance in the tank.

I feed a variety of 4 types of food for the upper fish (flake and micro pellet) and 4 (different) types of sinking food for substrate fish. Presently I am using Omega One, Hikari and New Life Spectrum as my main brands, but I also use the Nutrafin sinking tablets (all the substrate fish just love these, so I use them). At least one of the four types, whether for upper or lower fish, should be veggie-based (algae/spirulina/kelp).

Frozen foods like bloodworms, other worms, brine shrimp and daphnia can be used as treats now and then. Worms should not be fed more than once or at most twice weekly. Live foods, esp in summer, like small ants, mosquito larvae, etc are good. And some natural vegetables like yams (very nutritious), certain squash, cucumber and greens, all blanched, are fine too provided sufficient prepared foods are being taken for the balanced nutrients.

Byron.

I think the most important aspect of feeding is to use a good quality fish food. I studied this at some length and find that some fish food is manufactured with lower quality fish meal, while others are made from fresh, whole, food grade fish, kelp, etc.

You can alternate food brands if you like, but if the quality is high, this is less important than is was in the old days. As Byron mentions, augment a good quality flake or sinking food with frozen food treats (brine shrimp, bloodworms, daphnia).
Mine go nuts over the brine shrimp they get as a treat after the weekly water change.

I feed once or twice a day in small amounts. I think we typically tend to feed fish too much so we should be careful about over feeding.

Just curious, what brands are considered high quality?

I mentioned three that are, from what I have read here and elsewhere.

Omega One uses fresh, whole fish and kelp. New Life Spectrum uses fishmeal, but meal made from whole herring and whole krill. Hikari uses fishmeal, but makes no claim as to quality. Ed's Almost Natural uses whole, fresh, food grade fish (the same fish we would buy to eat).

Why fishmeal is not as good as fresh fish.... Most fishmeal is the waste by product of fish processing plants (heads, guts, bones, etc.). It is ground, dried, loaded with preservatives and sits in a warehouse until a fish food maker buys it. Because the protein is dried, copious amounts of starch (typically rice, oat or wheat flour) is used as a binder/filler. Fish can't really process this and it passes on through. When fresh fish (protein) is used, less binder/filler is required.
So fishmeal isn't 'bad', but in many ways the finished fish food is just not as good as those made with whole, fresh fish.

I feed once a day with Omega One color flakes and New Life Spectrum pellets. Every two weeks or so, I'll give them a treat of frozen brine shrimp and frozen blood worms.