• You are viewing the forum as a Guest, please login (you can use your Facebook, Twitter, Google or Microsoft account to login) or register using this link: Log in or Sign Up

Critique my aquascape Help aquascaping - first time

Bhavik

Member
Joined
17 Feb 2017
Messages
250
Location
London
Hi i need some help in organising my plant, not sure where the best position would be for them.

Could some one please help me, have attached a picture of the tank.

In terms of plants i have
Crinum thaianum
crinum calamistratum - which will be going in
Amazon sword - bleheri and ozelot green
giant vals
cryptocoryne usteriana
cryptocoryne aponogetifolia
echinodorus tenellus

Will be adding
dwarf sag
staurogyne repens
hydrocotyle japan

I also have some driftwood and dragonstone that i can add to the tank to will upload pictures of them too

Appreciate your help
 

Attachments

  • IMG_0300.jpg
    IMG_0300.jpg
    2.3 MB · Views: 429
  • IMG_0301.jpg
    IMG_0301.jpg
    2.2 MB · Views: 254
Here is the driftwood and dragons tones that I have
 

Attachments

  • A3684B9A-99A4-44BB-BCD6-84EEB55DE936.jpeg
    A3684B9A-99A4-44BB-BCD6-84EEB55DE936.jpeg
    4.3 MB · Views: 172
  • 53731E3C-A9FA-44B2-B80B-EC4C04080625.jpeg
    53731E3C-A9FA-44B2-B80B-EC4C04080625.jpeg
    4.4 MB · Views: 188
I think you need to add some hardscape in first to give the tank some structure if you have dragon stone and driftwood that is perfect, use it to divide your tank up and create sections to add your plants into and around. Have a look at some other planted tanks and see what kind of layout you like, triangle, island etc and get some ideas of what you can achieve. At the moment there is no where specifically to look and the tank looks quite bare. The background is quite distracting too and showing up your water marks on the back glass - can you change this to a plain background? Either solid black or frosted backgrounds look really good too - eventually your background plants like the Valis and Criniums will be the background so a printed design/image isnt really needed.

Most of the plants you mentioned will do ok in a low tech set up but you will need root tabs and regular fertilisers. Switching to a plant friendly substrate like Aquasoil would have benefits too though. I can see you have a sponge filter and also what looks like a filter inlet pipe good flow will help - what is the external filter? I can see the inlet is sat on/in the sand is this not just sucking up loads of sand?

I'm concerned by your fish too, Jewel Cichlids and Discus are not a good mix, Jewels can be very aggressive and there is no way Discus would stand up to them. They also have really different water requirements too. Jewels are likely to dig plants up too. What is the big brown fish I can see to the left of the picture?

Andy
 
Thanks for the reply,

Can you give me a plan or an example as to where i can put the driftwood and dragonstone as i have no idea or clue as to what will look good or not, i have tried to mess about with it before but didnt look good hence i removed it.
The background will be coming off soon

As for the plants yes i do add root tabs and ferts. The inlet is fine not sucking the sand up - ive got a fluval 307, the flow is good i have a spray bar attached too.

The jewl cichlids have been fine with the discus had them together a while no problems, but they will be moving to another tank as soon as its ready. They dont digs the plants up so thats good

Would appreciate if you could help me position some of the plants and driftwood in positions that will look good as i have no idea.
 
Its kind of subjective as to what looks good - it might be worth looking on something like Pinterest or Flickr for pictures of tanks you like and watching YouTube vidoes on how people set scapes up. Green Aqua, George Farmer, Juris Jutajevs are my big inspirations at the moment but there are plenty of people out there with step by step tutorials with the materials you are using.

Maybe spliting your plant species into foreground, midground and background and then working out how they grow so you can layer them effecively within those groups. I would split your plants like this

Foreground
Echinodorus Tenellus (now called Helanthium Tenellum)
Dwarf Sag (very similar to the above though?)

Midground
Staurogyne Repens
Hydrocotyle sp.Japan

Background
Amazon Sword - Bleheri and Ozelot Green
Cryptocoryne Aponogetifolia
Cryptocoryne Usteriana
Giant Valis
Crinum Thaianum

Given you have so many tall growing narrow leaved background plants I would have these in groups against the back of the tank so the leaves flow over the surface so maybe keep your hardscape infront of these plants as a bit of a natural barrier behind the smaller mid and foreground plants?
 
Back
Top