Garuf
Member
Morning all.
2020 was wall to wall dogmuck so in a moment of madness I shut down my main shrimp tank, gave away my vampire crabs and came back to the aquascaping side of the hobby with a pair of fake ADA tanks.
First up is my dsm pseudo 45f aquascape which was something of an experiment. Because iwagumi's can be a bit of a 1 trick pony I wanted to do something that rewarded taking interest in the aquascape by having a hidden foreground and incorporating a lot of texture.
And well, it worked when the tank was dry but, now it's wet and the optics change, the foreground is as instantly viewable but, next time I know what to do to make it work better.
Oh and because it's a one of those panorama tanks, it's "backwards", why I hear you say, well, it means there's no silicone line in the background, crisp lines at the front. Nice.
In terms of things noticed, I use tropica's dosing line, if dosed as recommended it was so lean as to cause stunting and I was seeing deficiencies. At some point I'll do the leg work and figure out what I'm actually dosing to use as a reference against EI but meh, a pump a day works well at the moment. The gratiola is also a real algae magnet for staghorn and is a sort of sickly plant, I'll give it a few months and see if it was deficiencies. I'll most likely replant this with something daintier as the first change, It didn't really produce the nice pillow of plant I expected.
The Rotala hitting the surface fast is also a bit of an issue which I really should have seen coming but it was an experiment and I expected more of a crawling habit.
It's been a pretty painless set up really, I'll keep the bones of the scape and get the current planting "perfect" and then will replant and try out some other plantings. Ultimately I'll replant it with all grassy leaved plants and then shut it down and move onto something else.
Next is my pseudo 45p, this one I wanted to do a "traditional" nature aquarium using a good number of plants I've not really used before.
Those plant I've not used before? Namely 40million buces, all of which promptly melted.
Even though I thought I'd done everything right by running the filter on my quarantine tank for a number of weeks, then running the tank black for 2 weeks, then planting. I put this down to aquaflora's cell culture plants sucking and the plantlets being wayyyyyy too small to really pull through.
The tropica and aquasabi plants had only partial melt compared, not the full scale mushing out. Same goes for the stems, the aquaflora rotala and myriophyllum guyana came as tiny plantlets none being bigger than 1.5cm, which you guessed it, promptly melted to nothing. I'll replant those very soon with tropica versions. I'm told that melt is normal for buce (and rotalas), especially cell cultured, but the deep purple doesn't really have a rhizome to regrow from and rotala's that die don't really regrow so we just have to see.
This one is only a couple of weeks old and is intended as a slow burner so I'm not really expecting to see much in the first few months, stems will grow and bulk up, I'll trim and form them into a concave scape, if them buces are to come back, they will, if they don't I'll have to purchase something in their place.
I'll likely add more fissidens as the tank matures and I can trim it out of the 45f. The bolbitits and java petite I'll keep trimming back in... It's a high maintenance low maintenance tank.
There's not a huge amount to say about this one except 100euros worth of buce's dissolved and I'm bitter.
Erm other notes, all the wood and stone work is self collected stagheaded oak, the sand is ungraded gravel mixed with self collected river stones.
I snapped a lilly pipe inlet pretty much instantly, but because I run shrimp guards, I figured no harm no foul - turns out, the lily strangled the flow and the shrimp guard only gives noticeably better flow. I superglued my fingers to a cup of coffee preparing the moss stones, it took 3 afternoons and I bloody hated it but it is easier than using cotton. Yeah, just needs to grow in and mature.
Oh and twinstar users, did you notice a sort of "burn in" where the spectrum shifts? My 45f when planted for the first few weeks was just really ugly to look at a yellowy purple hue being obvious, the 45p I'm noticing the same thing.
2020 was wall to wall dogmuck so in a moment of madness I shut down my main shrimp tank, gave away my vampire crabs and came back to the aquascaping side of the hobby with a pair of fake ADA tanks.
First up is my dsm pseudo 45f aquascape which was something of an experiment. Because iwagumi's can be a bit of a 1 trick pony I wanted to do something that rewarded taking interest in the aquascape by having a hidden foreground and incorporating a lot of texture.
And well, it worked when the tank was dry but, now it's wet and the optics change, the foreground is as instantly viewable but, next time I know what to do to make it work better.
Oh and because it's a one of those panorama tanks, it's "backwards", why I hear you say, well, it means there's no silicone line in the background, crisp lines at the front. Nice.
In terms of things noticed, I use tropica's dosing line, if dosed as recommended it was so lean as to cause stunting and I was seeing deficiencies. At some point I'll do the leg work and figure out what I'm actually dosing to use as a reference against EI but meh, a pump a day works well at the moment. The gratiola is also a real algae magnet for staghorn and is a sort of sickly plant, I'll give it a few months and see if it was deficiencies. I'll most likely replant this with something daintier as the first change, It didn't really produce the nice pillow of plant I expected.
The Rotala hitting the surface fast is also a bit of an issue which I really should have seen coming but it was an experiment and I expected more of a crawling habit.
It's been a pretty painless set up really, I'll keep the bones of the scape and get the current planting "perfect" and then will replant and try out some other plantings. Ultimately I'll replant it with all grassy leaved plants and then shut it down and move onto something else.
Next is my pseudo 45p, this one I wanted to do a "traditional" nature aquarium using a good number of plants I've not really used before.
Those plant I've not used before? Namely 40million buces, all of which promptly melted.
Even though I thought I'd done everything right by running the filter on my quarantine tank for a number of weeks, then running the tank black for 2 weeks, then planting. I put this down to aquaflora's cell culture plants sucking and the plantlets being wayyyyyy too small to really pull through.
The tropica and aquasabi plants had only partial melt compared, not the full scale mushing out. Same goes for the stems, the aquaflora rotala and myriophyllum guyana came as tiny plantlets none being bigger than 1.5cm, which you guessed it, promptly melted to nothing. I'll replant those very soon with tropica versions. I'm told that melt is normal for buce (and rotalas), especially cell cultured, but the deep purple doesn't really have a rhizome to regrow from and rotala's that die don't really regrow so we just have to see.
This one is only a couple of weeks old and is intended as a slow burner so I'm not really expecting to see much in the first few months, stems will grow and bulk up, I'll trim and form them into a concave scape, if them buces are to come back, they will, if they don't I'll have to purchase something in their place.
I'll likely add more fissidens as the tank matures and I can trim it out of the 45f. The bolbitits and java petite I'll keep trimming back in... It's a high maintenance low maintenance tank.
There's not a huge amount to say about this one except 100euros worth of buce's dissolved and I'm bitter.
Erm other notes, all the wood and stone work is self collected stagheaded oak, the sand is ungraded gravel mixed with self collected river stones.
I snapped a lilly pipe inlet pretty much instantly, but because I run shrimp guards, I figured no harm no foul - turns out, the lily strangled the flow and the shrimp guard only gives noticeably better flow. I superglued my fingers to a cup of coffee preparing the moss stones, it took 3 afternoons and I bloody hated it but it is easier than using cotton. Yeah, just needs to grow in and mature.
Oh and twinstar users, did you notice a sort of "burn in" where the spectrum shifts? My 45f when planted for the first few weeks was just really ugly to look at a yellowy purple hue being obvious, the 45p I'm noticing the same thing.
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