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Biding Time (22 gal, no CO2)

So I went to the AGA convention this past weekend and it was very inspiring! Unfortunately I’ve got a nursing infant cramping my style, but it was close to home and had an awesome speaker list, so I was determined to see as much as I could. Even with my tight schedule it was fantastic! The talks left me buzzing with ideas, and I even had a little time to make connections with some local people in the hobby. I wish I had had more time to hang around, but it was more than worth the effort to go.

Seeing Sudipta Shaw’s lecture on high energy non-CO2 tanks especially was a highlight; I’ve picked his brain about his tanks online before, but in the time since then he’s done some more experimenting and reading and had some insights that really illuminated some things I had observed in my own tanks. I walked out with some ideas about what I can do to improve things in the future. It was a heady mix of validating and motivating. And then Diana Walstad took the first question after his talk and it was… kind of surreal? It wasn’t too surprising she was there - she lives nearby! But it was like, whoa, the lady from my book is talking to the guy from the internet and it is all very specifically relevant to my planted aquarium praxis; the world is too small.

Both Sudipta Shaw and Dennis Wong had portions of their lectures about the unique utility of soil substrates galvanized my commitment to them going forward. I am quite convinced that for my system I need soil to act as both a nutrient source/sink and as the primary source of CO2 for my tank from microbe respiration. As much as I am the first person to support all the various ways of building a successful tank, I can’t equivocate when it comes to my own practices. So I’m happy for all of you who love inert substrates and primarily dose through the water column, but for all the missteps I’ve made in this hobby going with soil has not been one of them.

Of course I also bought a bunch of plants and had to set up the nano tank I got in the aquascaping workshop as a holding tank. (The workshop was really great, but the hardscape isn’t perishable, you know?) I shuffled a lot of stuff around so the new tank has a lot of the stargrass and hottonia that has grown out from tissue culture as well as some new stuff. The pressure is on to get my big tank going - I put Echinodorus ‘Fancy Twist’ and Cryptocoryne balansae in here, so it’s only a matter of time before they get way too big. The clock is ticking now, but I’ve got a plan, I swear.

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Biding Time is almost 2 years old!
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It's funny to go back and see where my head was at when I first set it up. I wanted to try out some new equipment and plants and I did that, but things didn't really go as I expected. I have come to appreciate my 20 gallon long tank a lot more than I did two years ago. I thought it was over the hill and I would tear it down soon, but it proved to be superior at growing plants and it took a couple of years thinking about it before I had a solid working theory for why.

I was aiming to get some color going, and I think I have fully achieved that. Rotala 'Blood Red' has sky rocketed in popularity in the past two years for very good reasons - it's easy to get red (even pink in low energy conditions!) and it's tough. I highly recommend it for non-injected tanks. I'm also very pleased with the color of Cryptocoryne affinis 'Red' and my Bacopa caroliniana now has a solid orange tinge that I wasn't expecting. I finally have Ludwigia 'Super Red' growing well and it's living up to its reputation. I recently got Enchinodorus 'Fancy Twist' and 'Reni' that I am hoping will bring interesting colors in the big tank. Taken together, it's a world apart from the all-green landscape I came from.

But the biggest disappointment of Biding Time has been that only some of the new species I tried thrived in the long run. I think this came down to an immature tank and substandard aquasoil that did not foster strong growth in material that needed to adapt to submerged conditions. These plants were ultimately done in by my year of shoddy maintenance; when I started cleaning stuff up at the end of last year, anything that was struggling was purged. I've had better luck introducing plants since then, like the hottonia and star grass. A lot of the plants I picked up at the convention are second tries of species I lost, and the difference in having more robust plant material in a mature tank is striking - nice, clean growth from the jump. I doubt they will meet the same fate.

Another aspect that has been fairly unpredictable to me is how tall things grow. There's just a lot of difference in growth habits for the exact same plants between my tanks. I suspect that Biding Time has more light and leaner soil, so many things are staying shorter than I would have guessed, though not always for the same reason. I think the crypts are shorter because of the light, but the Ludwigia repens would grow better with richer soil. On the flip side, Narrow K java ferns and Bacopa are tallest in Biding Time, and who knows what that is about. Biding Time has an area in the center of the layout that is short and packed with so many different plants. It's kind of interesting, but definitely not what I planned. In the bottom 3" there are about 4 different types of crypts, Hottonia palustris, Pogostemon helferi, Blyxa japonica, Ludwigia repens, a couple different rotala, water sprite, etc.
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I'll leave one last interesting accident: a epiphytic crypt. I pulled it out of my nano tank a long time ago and just tucked it between some wood and a big java fern because I didn't have anywhere to put it and it eventually attached itself. This picture is from the side with the fern removed for maintenance.

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Mr.Shenanagins said:
So glad you got to go to the convention, I wasn’t able to work it out with my schedule otherwise I would have been. Sounds like it was an awesome time.
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I've not been to a convention in the hobby before, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but I felt like it had a lot to offer for the size. I don't feel like I paid enough money for it, honestly. Obviously if you have to travel then it wouldn't be a cheap weekend, but as someone who could drive from home I feel like I got away with highway robbery. I'll definitely look at going to the next one in two years, but it'll depend on where it is and the speaker list. I'm curious to go to other fish-related conventions in the area, but this one definitely set a high bar that will be difficult to match.
 
I don't have much of an update, but I feel like this tank is getting closer to being truly balanced. There have been a million little things that have been bugging me (spots of algae, specific plants not quite growing as they should) and about half of them have resolved over the last month or two. Of course I've got half a million little things left, but they are minor and I'm feeling good about the situation overall. I have upped my WC schedule to every 5 days instead of weekly and have spent time doing some deeper cleaning of the substrate. I have never cleaned the sides and back glass or the rocks and I think I might actually get around to it one of these days. I think the next big project is going to be to deal with the thicket of Pomatogeton gayi in the front left corner. (I have such mixed feeling about that plant - it is tough and attractive (if untidy), but it sneaks its way into everything.)

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I see lot of room for improvement, but on the whole I'm pretty happy with it.

The new plants I got at AGA are all doing well, at least the ones in my established tanks. As I mentioned before, a lot of these are repeat plants that never took off in the first year and were lost in the Year of Neglect and my experience couldn't be more different this time around. It turns out things are much easier with a stable tank, stronger source material, and under the care of a more experienced aquarist. Ludwigia 'Super Red', Blyxa japonica, and Helanthium 'Vesuvius' are all settled in and putting on tons of new growth and I'm very pleased - they are all very cool plants! Most of plants that I got from the aquascaping workshop also seem to be doing pretty well, which is nice because they were all impulse choices and are having to convert from emersed growth. The Lilaeopsis brasiliensis is spreading and the Pogostemon helferi is chunking up nicely. Buce 'Wavy Green' hasn't changed that much, but has some new leaves and no algae, so that's about all I can ask for from a busy. I am not sure about the Alternanthera reineckii 'Rosanervig' though... I only have it in the 20 long and the new nano and I think it's growing, but very, very slowly. The old growth hasn't deteriorated yet, so I'm not sure what it's doing. It would be nice if it works out, but I won't be too broken up if it doesn't - I've got several bright red/pink plants and I don't really need another one.

The new nano has a lot more melt and has hit diatoms, but that's hardly surprising one month in. I'm not stressing about it - the whole tank was a spur of the moment thing and I have most of the plants thriving in another tank, so it really is just overflow. I did get some frogbit to help with the initial setup period, but annoyingly most of it did not survive the mail. I had one single clump make it and it is growing leaves and roots, so hopefully I'll have more than I want in no time. If all goes well I only really need one clump to start, so I'm optimistic.
 
It’s been about 6 months of steady maintenance and things are finally better than where I left them in late 2022. The plant mix has changed a bit, but most species present seem firmly established in at least one tank. I’ve been slowly propagating my stem plants and I’m running out of floor space to replant in both my 20 gallon and Biding Time. I know logically I should toss anything I don’t have space for, but the slow pace of growth makes each inch of material feel hard fought and it’s difficult for me to part with. This personal quirk is the real reason my tanks are so jungly and disorganized - I’m cowardly with the scissors and the trash can.

My 20 gallon is back to fully overgrown and almost everything seems very happy. I moved Echinodorus ‘Fancy Twist’ into this tank from the new nano because the older leaves were getting unwieldy. It’s in a pot of new aquasoil and since the move it has grown a bunch of new leaves that are bright magenta. The main mystery of this tank is what happened to the red tiger lotus - I used to have one big plant, and now I have a million baby plants hidden in the back. Anytime I try to move one into Biding Time, it dies. What is this about? I suspect they might appreciate a root tab, but even though I have and use Osmocote in my garden, I’ve never used them in my tank. I don’t want to risk upsetting the balance in this tank, at least not right now. Still, the single big plant was one of my favorites and I miss it.

There’s not too much to report about Biding Time. It still has a moderate bba problem that I am trying to address with a period of increased water changes focused on cleaning the substrate, and targeted hydrogen peroxide application. I also turned the lights down a smidge. We'll see if this helps, but it definitely won't hurt.

My last remaining endler died and that’s a bummer, but I had him for nearly 4 years and it’s my understanding they are typically fairly short lived. He’d been slowing down for a while, so I blame old age. I loved his color morph, but I haven’t seen any similar ones for sale since, and even when I bought my original bunch there were no females available. I probably will get endlers again one day, though they aren’t in my short or medium term plans right now.

The new nano is a minor disaster at present. The small diatom outbreak doesn't concern me, but there’s significantly more melt than I was expecting. In fact, this is probably my least graceful start up outside of my attempt at a no-tech system in 2020. It turns out the aquasoil I was given at the AGA workshop leeches a lot more ammonia than I have ever experienced and though the concentration of ammonia is 0.5 to 0.75 ppm, the nitrates are piling up. That’s one factor, and then it’s on a bottom shelf near the floor, and I just haven’t given it the attention I might have if I didn’t have to hunch over to see it. It’s not a total failure by any means- I’ve got a fair amount of star grass and pearl weed that are putting on clean mass, and my one piece of frogbit is increasing, so that should help deal with the excess nutrients. I actually increased my photoperiod from 6 hours to 9 and I’m trying not to go more than 2 days between water changes. Increasing the photoperiod is just something I have a hunch about, we’ll see if I’m right. Perhaps it's a good remind not to get cocky - if you take your eye off the ball, consequences are inevitable. I would love to add shrimp to help with the clean up, but things are a little too unstable yet.
 
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