chickennublet
Member
Hiya
I made an account awhile back but finally decided to start a journal here. I'm usually active on plantedtank.net but have been finding it rather quiet there in recent times. Wanted to share my tank here and document its changes (if there are any) and at the same time learn how to better take care of my tanks and pick up some extra pointers here and there. I also want to document what this tank used to look so show my progress a little.
I've had this little nano tank since 2019 but it has been torn down and set up maybe 4 or 5 times over the years, most recently in late April of this year. Have had varying degrees of successes before the latest rescape but I've never really been satisfied with the plant growth in this tank until now. This most recent rescape I changed two things which I think really helped:
1. Pushing the CO2 to higher levels. I do understand that a good way to make sure there's a good amount of CO2 is to inject enough so that the pH drops by 1 when the lights turn on but I don't think I ever did this test properly. Recently I've taken to simply pushing more CO2 before my fish and shrimp show signs of discomfort. It seems to have worked.
2. Realising that plants need less nutrients than I thought for them to grow well. I've always had a lot of stem plants in this tank and was under the impression that they would grow better if I simply fed them lots of nutrients. Some of the stems didn't seem to mind but members of the lythraceae family would stunt constantly. This time I've taken to dosing substantially less in the water column and my plants seem to be doing way better than in previous iterations of the tank. No doubt the aquasoil helps with this.
It is not much of an aquascape as this time I wanted a tank full of vibrant, healthy plants instead of a nature aquarium (or any other style of aquascape for that matter) and I think I have more or less achieved what I wanted with it. I'm also not much of a scaper anyway. I have been maintaining it for only slightly less than 5 months so still a very young tank but hopefully I keep this going long term.
Will be doing some maintenance tonight so here's a picture of what it looked like the night before:
This post is getting longer than intended so I'll share a bit more about the tank and some older pictures maybe in another post.
I made an account awhile back but finally decided to start a journal here. I'm usually active on plantedtank.net but have been finding it rather quiet there in recent times. Wanted to share my tank here and document its changes (if there are any) and at the same time learn how to better take care of my tanks and pick up some extra pointers here and there. I also want to document what this tank used to look so show my progress a little.
I've had this little nano tank since 2019 but it has been torn down and set up maybe 4 or 5 times over the years, most recently in late April of this year. Have had varying degrees of successes before the latest rescape but I've never really been satisfied with the plant growth in this tank until now. This most recent rescape I changed two things which I think really helped:
1. Pushing the CO2 to higher levels. I do understand that a good way to make sure there's a good amount of CO2 is to inject enough so that the pH drops by 1 when the lights turn on but I don't think I ever did this test properly. Recently I've taken to simply pushing more CO2 before my fish and shrimp show signs of discomfort. It seems to have worked.
2. Realising that plants need less nutrients than I thought for them to grow well. I've always had a lot of stem plants in this tank and was under the impression that they would grow better if I simply fed them lots of nutrients. Some of the stems didn't seem to mind but members of the lythraceae family would stunt constantly. This time I've taken to dosing substantially less in the water column and my plants seem to be doing way better than in previous iterations of the tank. No doubt the aquasoil helps with this.
It is not much of an aquascape as this time I wanted a tank full of vibrant, healthy plants instead of a nature aquarium (or any other style of aquascape for that matter) and I think I have more or less achieved what I wanted with it. I'm also not much of a scaper anyway. I have been maintaining it for only slightly less than 5 months so still a very young tank but hopefully I keep this going long term.
Will be doing some maintenance tonight so here's a picture of what it looked like the night before:
This post is getting longer than intended so I'll share a bit more about the tank and some older pictures maybe in another post.
