How to Make a Fresh Fruit Treat for Crested Geckos

Honestly, the only real reason to give your gecko a fruit treat is that it makes you feel good. Geckos don't bond with you and don't love you more for a treat. They enjoy sweet food because sweeter usually means more calories, but a treat doesn't make their lives better. I understand the feeling, though. I care about my geckos too.

How often

No more than once a month. The rest of their feedings should be a balanced, complete diet. You will find lists online of "safe" fruits ranked by calcium and phosphorus ratios. I don't pay attention to them. If you feed fruit so often that those ratios matter, you are feeding it far too often. The one rule: no citrus.

My three blends

Banana is always the base.

1. Banana, pear and mango.
2. Banana, grapes and raspberries.
3. Banana, blueberries and strawberries. This one gets the best feeding response. They really like blueberries.

How I make it

None of this is measured precisely. It's a treat, so the nutrition isn't the point.

1. Put one whole banana in a small smoothie blender, then the other fruit. For the first blend I use about half a pear and half a mango. For the blueberry blend, a handful of blueberries and about six strawberries. Peel the pear if your blender doesn't handle skin well. Take the stickers off.
2. Add a little water. I start with about a quarter of a cup and add more if needed. Grapes are watery, so that blend needs less.
3. Add about a tablespoon of honey for sweetness.
4. Add about a quarter teaspoon of Repashy Calcium Plus, the same calcium and vitamin powder I dust insects with.
5. Blend to about the consistency of gecko food: a little thicker than water, close to ketchup.

Fruit that is going soft is fine. Geckos eat rotting fruit off the forest floor in the wild. I cut off the worst of any mold and use the rest.

Freeze it in tiny portions

One batch fills a 590 ml (20 oz) blender cup almost to the top, far more than a couple of pet geckos need. Pour it into tiny ice cube trays, smooth it into the holes and freeze. Once frozen, seal the trays in a ziploc bag so they don't get freezer burn. They keep for eight or nine months at least.

On treat day, drop two or three cubes into a normal food dish. They thaw in the cage and turn back to liquid.

Other uses

• Picky eaters: blend a couple of cubes into your normal Pangea or Repashy diet for a sweetness boost.
• Weaning off sweet food: for a gecko raised on baby food or fruit, blend cubes into its diet and use fewer over time.
• Calcium loading breeders: stirring a lot of calcium into a normal diet changes the flavor and they eat less. Instead, make a big batch of fruit treat with a lot of calcium in it. I give breeder females two feedings, a week apart, in early spring as breeding starts and again in the fall, around November, as it ends.