Change of heart

[Martin in Holland]

My 40 liter tank has a little tree which keep tilting over (not a good base), also always have trouble with tuning the CO2 (cheap needle) which resulted in BBA. The BBA is under control now, but that tree still bugs me...so time for a change.
I want to try to rescape it with water and fish still in it, cause it only involves one half of the tank. I also want to let the plants grow with CO2 in the startup face but turn low tech later that's why I only want to use mosses, ferns and maybe some other easy plant(s).
I've been messing around a bit with some stones and wood in an IKEA bucket (the tank is a bit bigger though so the wood won't stick out later and there is more space left) just to see if this works.
Let me know what you think.

 

[Vivian Andrew]

looking very good Martin, and nice wood u got there

 

[Martin in Holland]

Today I stressed the fish and shrimp by taking out the old wood, plants and atleast 70% gravel while they were still in the tank. The new stuff went in a cloudy tank which meant I couldn't really see what I was doing at some points, but in the end I think this way is much easier (for this size tank) than cleaning everything out and placing the fish in a bucket or something.

Probably will mess about a bit whit some plants (which is easy because most of them are tight to some stones), but for now this is it.

 

[Martin in Holland]

Long time no update...but here it is.
I had some trouble with BBA, still have some, but it is getting less and less. Some plants just didn't like to grow in the tank in the beginning, now however they seem to like it much more...the mini Bolbatis needs to fill in the right side to bring back the balence. The light was tooooooo much which I brought don't by more than half

I'm pretty pleased so far in how everything is growing (except for the BBA ofcourse..).

 

[drodgers]

Looking good! I feel your pain with the bba ,I have some on my hard scape from too much light in the beginning, that i cant seem to eradicate.
True Siamese algae eaters supposedly eat it? Have yet to try it.

 

[Martin in Holland]

3 SAE are in there and indeed they helped a lot, I even think that they are the reason that the BBA is slowly getting less.