its not unlikely to me they needed more time to catch up to speed.
I guess you're very correct.
Sometimes I have thought that the length of some of your experiments is not long enough to account for the relative slowness of a low tech system.
I agree. There are three things that make me doing short experiments in Micurins:
(1) I'm hungry for knowledge, impatient. There's so many things I'd like to test and elucidate, and I've got only one (poor) Maq and four tanks of which one is usually 'Control'.
(2) Some species get overgrown pretty quickly and shade the others. I'd have to choose only slow growers. But then again, see point (1).
(3) For medium-term experiments, my Portugals are designed. The very tanks we discuss within this thread. So, I think I'll do as you suggest: Make one of the tanks (probably Branco) more mineralized/fertilized. Last time I've measured 102 µS/cm conductivity, that's about 50-60 TDS. Not exactly 'hard' water, still the hardest of them all.
Well, I speak about hardness, but to keep my beloved
ratios, when I dose more N & P, I must add K, and therefore I must add Mg & Ca as well. In short, adding nutrients in the narrow sense means increasing total mineralization.
Yes, I'll give it a try. (Also curious what my
Ammannias would say, that's another disaster of mine.)