Me and my Creatures

I've kept leopard geckos since 2015.

 

In the beginning, like most people, I got things very wrong - purple calcium sand, unregulated heat mats, cohabitation. It took years of gentle nudging from amazing online communities, cross-referencing sources, and simply watching my animals closely to work out what actually made a difference to their health and quality of life.

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By 2019, I had decided I wanted to ethically breed Leopard Geckos.

 

I imported Glowworm - my sweet angel boy - from Portugal to start a breeding programme, and spent the next few years properly immersed in the world of leopard gecko genetics, husbandry at scale, and the chaos of hatching and raising hundreds of angry little baby geckos.

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I stopped breeding in 2024. I was never able to make a living from it, and eventually I stopped trying. Every time I turned a profit, something would happen - a genetics disaster, an equipment failure, or I'd look around at my collection and decide everyone deserved better enclosures, and the money would evaporate into slate tiles and thermostat upgrades before I'd even blinked.

 

I found it genuinely difficult to balance welfare and enrichment with the realities of running a business, and slowly, the thing I loved most started to feel like a job I wasn't getting paid for.

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Then I lost Grimey and Squib - two geckos I had a particularly close bond with - within 14 days of each other, and something shifted.

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Grimey was one of those animals. She came to me far too small - shipped from Germany more or less straight from the egg. She was 3 grams when she arrived and I hand-fed her every day. At about 5 months old I noticed a lump on her arm, which was later diagnosed as skin cancer. We opted for amputation and she continued to grow and thrive. She was the one I'd reach for when my nephews came round, utterly reliable, utterly sweet. The kind of gecko that makes you understand why people fall so hard for this species. Eventually, a recurring eye infection became resistant to every antibiotic available to us, and she had to be euthanised after a long struggle at 5 years old.

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Squib was my second-ever gecko, and she was eleven years old. She was, to put it plainly, a total b-word - greedy, always on a diet, endlessly entertaining to watch hunt. She moved house with me and the stress simply was too much for her, which felt cruelly unfair for an otherwise healthy animal only just beginning to show her age.

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After losing them both, I went through the motions for about twelve months. Eventually, I rehomed the majority of my breeding collection; gorgeous animals I'd raised from eggs, animals I knew inside out, because I couldn't give them what they deserved while I was running on empty.

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But I couldn't delete this website.

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Years of blog posts, hard-won knowledge, genuine passion, and a resource I would have found actually useful back in 2015, when I was Googling frantically on a bus to a pet shop that was about to sell me purple calcium sand and call it a care kit.

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Now I have fourteen leopard geckos. Feeding everyone takes minutes (you get extremely efficient after seasons of feeding 150 hatchlings a day). I know each of them individually, their lineages, their quirks, their preferences. I still have shelves of spare water bowls and slate and bulbs. I am, genuinely, enjoying them again.

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And I finally feel ready to share what I know with the people who need it.