First 24hour. No changes in the plants. Obviously.
I also have the luxury of time and a clean room now to go through my thoughts and explain what I was trying to do and highlight a few issues.
Firstly I’ll point to the major issues I encountered - pppppp.
Proper planning prevents piss poor performance. Don’t do what I did and buy your plants, equipment and tank expecting a just in time miracle. TNT will loose your aquarium, your light won’t arrive on time and your plants will be on your desk or thrown in other tanks and the condition won’t be 10/10.
Pppppp. When scaping to a plan. Go back to the plan and ask yourself “is this the plan or is this something new”.
With this scape I tried really really hard to picture branches that had been washed down stream and become trapped against a large rock. I was also trying to picture a flooded grassland.
Does what I made really reflect that? Right now, no.
Well, what happened?
Basically, I got home from work after eating a McDonald’s and decided to try and knock out the majority of the scape before going to bed knowing that Planting needed to happen on Saturday or Sunday otherwise it would be another week before I’d have time and I’d already pulled the 45p down so the clock was ticking.
My truing stand at work says “don’t drink and true” on it - I should have the same sticker that says don’t scape and drink.
Now, I haven’t drank more than 2 beers for over 2 years now, lock down and head health and so on, but customers insist on leaving beer as a tip so I put away 8 cans while working.
This was a mistake.
One because I had a stinking hangover in the morning and 2 because I defaulted to “near enough is good enough” and allowed to wood to “speak” to me and dictate the scape. The opposite of the scaping to a plan and finding the right wood for the plan ethos.
If I’d not felt the time pressure, this scape would be much different with a much simpler structure. “Ahhh, thar’ll do” is the enemy of good work.
Next time I scape and live with it for a minimum of 2 weeks before planting. I’d recommend this to everyone. Do as I say not as I do.
Hopefully the planting will push the tank back to the theme, I’ve tried to use only grass like or needle leaved stems.
I have also used rotala Ceylon and HM as a filler. Because hm I had and Ceylon is pink and I had it.
I’ll replace them when the tank is more mature but with what I aren’t sure. But what ever stem it will be it’s important that it forms loose bunches not dense hedges.
Things that also didn’t happen as I planned, because of the time pressure, half the tank being sand. How did that happen? Easy. Insufficient pppppp and allowing the wood to dictate the scape. I was trying to get the woodwork in the foreground to not touch the bottom on the tank with sand all the way back. However the large wood that splits the tank just didn’t work like that so I used it as a retaining wall. What I should have done is use different wood and stuck to the plan but I’m lucky in that that outcome is like a 6-7/10 regardless.
Other notes.
“thermal glue” is crap.
Epoxy putty is a life saver when you need wood to poke at an angle for “drama”.
Silicone is even better but you have to remember to buy it.
Squirting liquid superglue onto filterfloss will save you a lot of swearing.
Having too many plants is a nice luxury but the sadness of having 2 bucketfuls of plants and no way to save them is worse.
I have used tropica baselayer and new soil and then capped with old soil. Richest, rich, least rich. Also adds bacteria, micro life etc to speed up maturity.
I used filter media taken from all of my filters so that the ceramic media is all mature. I also added 1l of carbon and a bag of pyrogen to help soak up organics from the wood.
The water is still slightly milky but I think this will pass with a couple of water changes, I think it’s from the ceramic media. It could also be bacterial.
I added the first ferts and co2 and now it’s just water out, water in for a few weeks.
That’s it for now.
