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Dirt Walstad 20 liter tank

Martin in Holland

Martin in Holland

Member
Joined
28 May 2013
Messages
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Be aware, this tank might be ending soon as I still have no clue what I'm doing. The idea is to make a tank with as little maintenance as possible, so I dumped plants in there that hopefully are ready to face some dirt in their life.

Tank is a little over 20 liter
No filter, only a small power head
No ferts added, as the dirt should provide this
No CO2 (liquid or gas)
Low light for 5.5 hours

The dirt was soaked for a month before it entered the tank, capped with sand and now running for one week with only some leftover plants from my 300 liter tank which had to make room for new plants.

kleiner 1.jpg

1 minute after planting. The stone on the left is only there to keep the wood down for now.
 
Great little scape!!.. I also have a little 25 litre tank like this, not scaped tho, just a plant bin.. But no dirt it has akadama and over 12 hours of light but very low.. It never shows any signs of algae and plants are realy healthy, it also gets no ferts. It's over a year old now.. Aslo no filter, just lots of plants, shrimps and snails and weekly WC. Last week i gave 25% of the plants away, it was getting to much..

So i see no reason why yours should be ending soon.. Might need some more plantmass, but that will grow on it's own.. Maybe some fast growers, if i think what it is you got there. Blyxa? That wont grow fast in low light with no co2, rather melt..
 
:) It might do good on dirted substrate.. In my case i did a inert startup in the low tech and all blyxa i've tried died slowly away.. Blyxa seems to need a good iron rich substrate to flourish realy nice.. There are people here growing it low tech like that.. I have no idea about what lights they are using, but they also stated it is a very slow grower in low tech.... I might need to try some blyxa again, since the tank/substrate might be mature enough by now after a year to house blyxa.. But till now it didn't work for me..
 
Another window tank set up with no filter, CO2, etc, etc
(heater added to maintain ~22 - 23C )
Some plants are doing better than others - the Gratiola viscidula has surprised me (planted 3-4 weeks ago) as it seems very keen ;)

 
Heya Martin,

You may want to consider adding an airline to the powerhead venturi. During my research and in doing soil based tanks afterwards, I've found that aeration really helps add a little CO2 (atmospheric equilibration) and the additional O2 gives the plants something extra to pump down to the roots that extend into the soil. When using Diana's method of using unamended soil it tends to compact and go anaerobic fairly quickly, which creates an O2 demand on the plants as they shunt it to the roots to keep them alive.

Hope this helps,
Phil
 
Hey Martin, great set up....looking forward to its development.

I think you may want to uncover that light eventually....With soil you'd expect the plants to pickup very fast, within 2-3 weeks they should explode... If the plants don't green up or start withering, and not growing... you may have a light problem. Judging by the video, there isn't enough light to be honest but I maybe wrong...but that blyxa will struggle, especially with the shadow of the wood. It doesn't do well in low light but it grows in a low tech otherwise....Intensity is more important than duration..
 
@sciencefiction ... I think you might be right with the Blyxa hiding under the wood, if they don't want to work for me I will replace them with crypts or something. The whole idea for me is to try and see what works in this low tech setup without getting to much algae problems.
 
You might have spotted the shrimp on the left mirrored in the side glass, it isn't transparent as it should be and this happened to all my shrimp (most already died). Nitrite, nitrate Ammonia, pH, temperature....all good, the only thing I could think of is that there isn't enough Calcium in the water (need to get a tester for that)....Or does anyone here has any idea what else this could cause shrimp to do?
 
The wood had to go, it kept dirtying the water and it also looked to be poisoning the fish and shrimp. After I took it out it smelled really bad, I should have boiled it first, dumb rookie mistake. Going to do some large water changes for a week or so, to get any rubish out of the water and hopefully make fish happy.

Plants are doing very good though and even no trace of algae yet, I placed a small filter earlier, in the hope it would help with the loose "wood debris" therefor only has some floss in it. The filter is less of an eyesore than the pump I had in the tank before, so it is staying. Without the wood piece, the plants will get better light and should even be doing better.

20161218_104523 kleiner.jpg

Some buce and anuubs floating for now, don't know what to do with them yet.
 
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