@ Suzoo: You're more than welcome ! But most people have an extra sleepingroom. We don't, we have our snakeroom. So the only place we have is between the garters
@Roy: We have breedinggroups aswell as a female group and a male group. When we don't want babies from a particular female we put her in the female group. This group contains different females from different species. Same with the males we don't want to breed with. We don't have any bad experience keeping different species together. But I have to say that any adult group, breeding, female or male, contains no more than 5 or 6 garters.
The young garter enclosures contains, depending how big they are, up to 50 garters. But when they get bigger we split them up. For example, one year olds we keep in a group of about 10 snakes.
We really prever to keep our snakes in groups, this stimulates them to eat. Here in Holland we would say: see them eating makes them eating
This workes aspecialy for babies. The first babies we had (eastern) we raised separate and a lot died. Maybe becouse this was the first nest, but also becouse they had no competition. There always strong ones who will eat right away and this will stimulate the smaller ones.
We have learned from that and now we keep the babies from each nest together.
And in our opinion they enjoy eachothers company.
And in breedinggroups it's good to have more than one male, so they notice competition between eachother and they have to "conquer" the female(s)
I hope you're alright with the answers.
Best wishes,
Sabine