Medic's 150 planted scape

[MedicMan]

Hello and thanks for reading my thread!

I've been a long time lurker of UKAPS and have now been keeping fish for close to 2 years. I've been keeping planted tanks for the past 1.5 and this is my first attempt at a truly aquascaped setup.

In this tank I've tried, where I can, to stick to concepts such as negative space, rule of thirds and golden ratio - though I doubt I've fulfilled them as best I could!

After reading several threads on the Dry Start Method and so many success stories, I wanted to try this out for myself.

There's been a number of sources for inspiration here but my visit to Leicester's Maidenhead Aquatics to see a talk by George Farmer on Aquascaping fuelled me to do this. It also helped that it's what I'd wanted to do for some time but lacked the confidence and knowledge to do so!

In this tank, I'll try and make a pathway along with using the Dry start method with mosses such as Fissidens Fontanus, Riccadia and Riccia.

So without further ado, the tank.

This is what I started off with :



This was obviously cleaned as best it could to :



There was LOADS of muck!

We'd come up with a bit of a plan on what we wanted to do. We've wavered a little but I think it's possibly for the best.




The wood piece we'd decided on was chopped and glued from about 4 different pieces:



We came up with a few layouts using our own tree root, along with ADA aquasoil. We've found this to work really well in the Discus tank so far from knocking it we decided to use it again.

Layout 1 :


Layout 2: (I love lidless!)




Layout 3 : Courtesy of the missus!



Layout 4 : this felt a bit more natural but also felt the right hand side was lacking something



As you can tell we're pretty set on the "tree" being on the Left of the tank. On the right of the tank, we're hoping the inlet and outlet pipes will be well hidden and a lilypipe will be placed on order soon.

Since we think we had a winner, some supports were made (inspired by The Green Machine, but just not as expensive!)

Cheapo corrugated plastic :



My own branded "MedicMan Substrate supports" :



This is pretty much as far as we got tonight (01/07/15) We're thinking the heater may be put behind the tree/hill and thus covered up.

 

[MedicMan]

So I head out looking for something to add to the right hand side of the tank.

Layout 5 : Something didn't feel quite right. My eyes were hunting for a focal point and were almost torn between top left and centre.
48a30e4c7d0bb3c2df93685dacedf0e7[1] by Abdul, on Flickr

Layout 6 : I moved the path slightly off centre and cut the root I bought, trying to lead the eyes to the bottom right corner. I'm quite happy with this and decided to start planting. (Mrs. Medic wouldn't have let me carry on with this tank without an "archway"!

Prepping the HC

So many HC plugs!

Very little HC went to waste. These strands were planted as seen in Andy's propagator thread.

The tank now :

2199b2f06390acf5e9ab583b57bb4d71[1] by Abdul, on Flickr

So I've saturated the Aquasoil with RO water, mixed with about 10ml of EI ferts (calculated from my previous EI mix for a 150L tank).
Luckily due to the current heat, the tank is staying at a toasty 28C with what seems a good humidity. I've yet to determine what the true humidity is.

I'm misting the tank 2x a day at present with an EI/RO mix - again, 5ml in about 2L of water - so fairly dilute. The lights are on for about 10Hrs and 100% covered with clingfilm.

It's only been two days with the substrate saturated so I'm not quite sure what to expect the next few days.

Any tips and advice are very very welcome!

 

[Jose]

Look out for any dying leaves. If they start browning then up your dosing and/or look at your humidity levels.

 

[MedicMan]

Thanks Jose! With the soil being Aquasoil - I didn't think I needed to put much in terms of ferts? I'm waiting on my hygrometer to be delivered but as I recall 70% humidity is best - is this what you think too?

 

[Jose]

Actually youre right probably no need to dose nothing at the start.
http://www.barrreport.com/forum/bar...e-a-nice-rug-of-hc-before-you-add-water/page2

 

[MedicMan]

So I've painted on the Fissidens using a greek yogurt and RO mix yesterday. I'm not 100% sure I've done this right though as I'm noticing the wood is drying out very quickly and not quite sure what this means for the fissidens.

 

[Dantrasy]

for further inspiration google image 'bent tree'. that first image is my desktop atm.

 

[zozo]

Lovely setup compliments.. Moss wont die so easily from a little drought, it will revive as soon it gets moist again. Keep spraying to saturate the wood with moist.

My fissidens came in nice long 3 to 4 cm strings. I glewed them to the wood with a tiny dot of super glew and filled the tank with a few cm of water and covered the tank it. Filled it up verry soon after that, so for the fissidens it wasn't realy a dry start. Glewing looks a bit clumsy in the beginning because of the glew turning white but it attached and grew very fast and lush in less then 25 days it covered all and did spread for several cm.
http://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/fissidens-fontanus-dry-start.35450/#post-400650
What did you do? Did you chop it up or just used the yogurt as a kind of sticky layer to glew it?

 

[MedicMan]

That is an excellent link! Thank you so much Zozo! The below quote answers and clears a LOT of my worries/concerns.

F. Fontanus doesnt need to be kept humid to grow. For anyone not aware it is a native moss of the UK (along with 7-8 other fissidens sp.) so it will survive and grow as long as you keep it damp or grow it on something damp. You can also let it dry out 100% and re-animate it and it will act like nothing happened.

In terms of putting it on :

 

[zozo]

That quote is true, but keep in mind that Mr.Luke probaly points to a full grown adult batch of moss which already attached and standing proud. And all mosses have the property soaking up and storing large quantities of water more then 10 x their own volume when dry (Like peatmoss does it 20 x) Im trying to dry start fissidens at the time on a rock emersed at 90% air humidty and it still takes a very long time to attach itself. It's on it for weeks now and still alive but not attached yet. On wood it attaches en spreads quicker.

Because moss attaches with Rhiziods i've used Rhizotonic from day 1 as stimulant to jumpstart the tank. I have no idea what yogurt will do and how fast that will work.. What i see in my Fontanus it grows much fatser submersed then emersed, so in my case i can state altough it can handle less humidity, but less humidity doesn't excel the growth it rather slows it down. The moss is still so young and brittle, emersed it can't not yet stand up with it's own strenght it lays just flat with all it's leaves as a sticky mass packed together. This prevents it uptaking the co2 it needs to grow fast, there isn't much free surface area for the leaves when sticking together only the toplayer can take from the surounding air. Under water it emediatly spreads it's leaves and the uptake surface area multiplies drasticaly.

I also have fissidens on the wood sticking out of my tank which is the same age as the fissidens in the tank, that's a few months now. Above the tank it still lives, but i do not realy see it grow nor spread it's leaves it's still a lump sticking togheter laying on the wood and other moss is overgrowing it. You would say in the open air it should have more co2 available but i see nothing much happening yet.

That's how i come to my above theory.. Can't make it run before it learned to stand up and it's still strugling to get that done. still to young i guess.

I'll keep watching this topic with great curiousity and hope to see your fissidens attaches readily on the yogurt.. I guess you still got a few weeks ahead before filling up the tank..

 

[mr. luke]

i never notice much growth when dsm'd but it deffinately attatches. Saying that fissidens seems to be the slowest thing i have ever experience underwater too

 

[MedicMan]

Not much change the past few days but I've noticed some fungus type of growth on the wood. Not quite sure why this is as the wood is almost bone dry!

Not having the most success I feel and every day I look at it I'm tempted to flood the tank.

While the tank states 95% humidity at 27c, I'm not sure this is the case. I wondering if I have a faulty hygrometer.

On the side of this I've also been running a propagator. I've only had this a few days and already noted growth. I'm wondering if this is due to a heated base so I will be getting a heating mat to place under the tank.

 

[MedicMan]

So it's been some time since I updated this thread, but lots has been going on with the tank.

It went through a stage HC melt, to sudden excellent growth from the DSM, followed by a stage of BGA attack on the entire right side of the tank. I finally gave up and removed a lot of the old plants, some of which had rooted amazingly well.

Here's a bit of what it looked like over the past few months :

August :

Mid September :

Then I went away to crete.... and things messed up because the person I left misting instructions to failed to follow.

Early October:

Then the tank was flooded... but issues remained. Lots of HC melt even though I was pumping CO2 into the tank. Turns out my inline diffuser had a hairline crack in it. Enough to allow CO2 diffusion, but not enough to keep the plants happy.

_NDS5962 by Abdul, on Flickr

At present :


Bazooka diffuser :

_NDS5957 by Abdul, on Flickr

Fissidens on a branch :

_NDS5946 by Abdul, on Flickr


A FTS with the CO2 on full :

_NDS5943 by Abdul, on Flickr

_NDS5964 by Abdul, on Flickr

_NDS5994 by Abdul, on Flickr

So the HC seems to be doing far better once I changed to the bazooka (I'm still waiting on an inline diffuser) but I've noticed some brown algae. I've been regularly siphoning this off in the hopes that it will go away.
I've got a cycled filter on a 60L tank which I'm considering moving over so that I can at least get some kind of a CUC moved in!

 

[MedicMan]

Small update : A new inline diffuser arrived today and has been fitted. The mist, while annoying, is so, so much better than the Bazooka.
I'll be putting it on the filter intake at some point once I'm sure things are getting better. For now, I'd rather not have too much / too often fluctuation in the CO2.