Trey Lanier
Member
- Joined
- 17 Apr 2015
- Messages
- 64
Just thought i would share with everyone my first planted tank and first journal on this forum! Hope that everyone enjoys it!!
Setup date- 5/21/15
Tank size- 60 gallon 38x19x20 inch custom
CO2- Aquatek dual-gauge pressure regulator 10 pund co2 tank and Do! Aqua diffuser
Filter- Hydor 450, Eheim skim 350
Substrates- Ada power sand M, 6L ada aqua soil amazonia powder, 4 9L ada aqua soil amazonia
additives- Ada Bacter 100, Clear super, Tourmaline bc, ATM Colony
Hard scape- 55 year old cedar stump.
Ferts- EI dosing
So i guess ill just start off by saying my love for planted aquariums started about 9 months ago when i saw one for the first time on YouTube. I thought to my self, what a beautiful sight to see and be able to control in your own house. To me this wasn't going to just be a one month and the tanks done project but instead turned into a 9 month project to get where i am today. Being 17 years old and dealing with going to school and working and also researching for this project was a handful but i was determined to make my dream come true!
What did i do to start making this dream become a reality? Every day for the next 6 months i was on the computer researching and researching and looking through the forums and watching every single solitary YouTube video that their is to watch on high tech tank and medium to low tech tanks, just filling my brain full of info so that when the day came to put this dream together, it would be in my eyes perfect. So i started my research around October. Now when i say research i don't mean writing up essays and then reading them over, research for me was just learning as much as possible and taking it all in and remembering the info. This process was probably the hardest time, taking about 3 hours out of my day each day and loving every moment of it!
Now during this period of time i started looking into what tanks their were out on the market and what not and all of the rimless high quality ones just seemed to be out of my budget, so what did i do? I looked everywhere on the internet for the cheapest place to order glass from and ended up building my own Tank! Following this i decided that it would be best for me to just build my own stand to make everything just right for me and my family! This process took about 3 months to do and during this time i was ordering the needed supply's so that i would have the time to make sure that i had all the needed supply's before i was getting my plants in.
How did i get my hardscape? I knew from the start that i was going to want to have driftwood in my scape instead of rocks so i was constantly looking around for some nice wood on the internet but just couldn't find my self buying a peace that i had not held. During this time i ended up having to go to my grandmas for a motocross race and while i was at her house i noticed that she had tons and tons of driftwood that she had been collecting over the years at a spring that she would go to every summer with the whole family. One stuck out to me and it was a red cedar stump that had great character to it and i knew at that moment that it was going to be the peace. Now i knew that cedar had sap that can kill fish from the toxins in it, but i also new that if the peace was old enough that it would have already been dried out and perfectly safe. Went to her and asked her how she had come across this peace of driftwood and she said she had found it around 55 years ago, about when my mom was just a little baby. Now by this time the wood would have already lost all its bark and any soft spots would have rotted away and this was truly the case as it was so hard that it would break any drill bit i tried to use to make holes to help sink it faster, and during the two months i had the wood, it never water logged. So what i had to do is take some slate and drill small wholes on the bottom of the wood and screw some stainless steel screws into it and that solved that problem!!
Following all this i got my aqua soil and all my additives an what i did was i put the aqua soil in the tank and added the hardscape and just started playing around with it for the next month until i finally found the perfect spot and look that i wanted. Now i knew that planting was going to be one of the hardest processes, because if you didnt know how plants matured that the scape could be thrown way off and end up not looking as natural as planned, so what i did was i took pictures of my tank with the soil and hardscape in it and went to corel draw which is a computer program that allows you to insert photos and make art. I began making up a list of plants that i wanted and finally was able to come up with the perfect look. This process took me around one week. now of course i new that the way the soil was going to be sloped was going to turn out different as i still had three more bags to use so i tryed my best with what i had.
Knowing how expensive aquarium plants are, i decided to make a immersed plant setup to prepare for the day of planting. I used a 50gallon tank and made my own lighting with 15 cfl 1600 lumen 6500k lights that my dads shops always had. In sense i had basically made $20 turn into $300+ in two months. Since this isn't a journal on this immersed setup ill just share two pics=).
first day planted
last day before plants were trimmed
Now i thought to my self, i really want moss but i dont want it taking away from the scape so i went researching on moss and came across mini fissidens and mini pellia. I ended up using Tom's idea on dry starting it the "blender method" and since i had tons of experience of immersed plants now, i thought this was the perfect thing to do! It took only two weeks for the moss to attach and actually started growing and was about 1/15 inch by the time i flooded the tank and started a week long process of trying to get as much ammonia out of the aqua soil before planting which i did 70% water changes each day for that week before the plants arrived.
Now the fun part! Planting!!! I received my plants last Friday and planted on that same day which took me 8 hours of cleaning and pruning the plants and then planting(since i was the only person. Hope you enjoyed my long story and hope that you can watch my scape hopefully mature into something amazing! Here are the pics!!!!!
I'll post the plant list when I get back home!!! How everyone enjoys the first parts!! I'll keep everyone updated with acouple pics each week!
Also here is a pic of what my ei dosing will be for the first few weeks
Setup date- 5/21/15
Tank size- 60 gallon 38x19x20 inch custom
CO2- Aquatek dual-gauge pressure regulator 10 pund co2 tank and Do! Aqua diffuser
Filter- Hydor 450, Eheim skim 350
Substrates- Ada power sand M, 6L ada aqua soil amazonia powder, 4 9L ada aqua soil amazonia
additives- Ada Bacter 100, Clear super, Tourmaline bc, ATM Colony
Hard scape- 55 year old cedar stump.
Ferts- EI dosing
So i guess ill just start off by saying my love for planted aquariums started about 9 months ago when i saw one for the first time on YouTube. I thought to my self, what a beautiful sight to see and be able to control in your own house. To me this wasn't going to just be a one month and the tanks done project but instead turned into a 9 month project to get where i am today. Being 17 years old and dealing with going to school and working and also researching for this project was a handful but i was determined to make my dream come true!
What did i do to start making this dream become a reality? Every day for the next 6 months i was on the computer researching and researching and looking through the forums and watching every single solitary YouTube video that their is to watch on high tech tank and medium to low tech tanks, just filling my brain full of info so that when the day came to put this dream together, it would be in my eyes perfect. So i started my research around October. Now when i say research i don't mean writing up essays and then reading them over, research for me was just learning as much as possible and taking it all in and remembering the info. This process was probably the hardest time, taking about 3 hours out of my day each day and loving every moment of it!
Now during this period of time i started looking into what tanks their were out on the market and what not and all of the rimless high quality ones just seemed to be out of my budget, so what did i do? I looked everywhere on the internet for the cheapest place to order glass from and ended up building my own Tank! Following this i decided that it would be best for me to just build my own stand to make everything just right for me and my family! This process took about 3 months to do and during this time i was ordering the needed supply's so that i would have the time to make sure that i had all the needed supply's before i was getting my plants in.
How did i get my hardscape? I knew from the start that i was going to want to have driftwood in my scape instead of rocks so i was constantly looking around for some nice wood on the internet but just couldn't find my self buying a peace that i had not held. During this time i ended up having to go to my grandmas for a motocross race and while i was at her house i noticed that she had tons and tons of driftwood that she had been collecting over the years at a spring that she would go to every summer with the whole family. One stuck out to me and it was a red cedar stump that had great character to it and i knew at that moment that it was going to be the peace. Now i knew that cedar had sap that can kill fish from the toxins in it, but i also new that if the peace was old enough that it would have already been dried out and perfectly safe. Went to her and asked her how she had come across this peace of driftwood and she said she had found it around 55 years ago, about when my mom was just a little baby. Now by this time the wood would have already lost all its bark and any soft spots would have rotted away and this was truly the case as it was so hard that it would break any drill bit i tried to use to make holes to help sink it faster, and during the two months i had the wood, it never water logged. So what i had to do is take some slate and drill small wholes on the bottom of the wood and screw some stainless steel screws into it and that solved that problem!!
Following all this i got my aqua soil and all my additives an what i did was i put the aqua soil in the tank and added the hardscape and just started playing around with it for the next month until i finally found the perfect spot and look that i wanted. Now i knew that planting was going to be one of the hardest processes, because if you didnt know how plants matured that the scape could be thrown way off and end up not looking as natural as planned, so what i did was i took pictures of my tank with the soil and hardscape in it and went to corel draw which is a computer program that allows you to insert photos and make art. I began making up a list of plants that i wanted and finally was able to come up with the perfect look. This process took me around one week. now of course i new that the way the soil was going to be sloped was going to turn out different as i still had three more bags to use so i tryed my best with what i had.
Knowing how expensive aquarium plants are, i decided to make a immersed plant setup to prepare for the day of planting. I used a 50gallon tank and made my own lighting with 15 cfl 1600 lumen 6500k lights that my dads shops always had. In sense i had basically made $20 turn into $300+ in two months. Since this isn't a journal on this immersed setup ill just share two pics=).
first day planted
last day before plants were trimmed
Now i thought to my self, i really want moss but i dont want it taking away from the scape so i went researching on moss and came across mini fissidens and mini pellia. I ended up using Tom's idea on dry starting it the "blender method" and since i had tons of experience of immersed plants now, i thought this was the perfect thing to do! It took only two weeks for the moss to attach and actually started growing and was about 1/15 inch by the time i flooded the tank and started a week long process of trying to get as much ammonia out of the aqua soil before planting which i did 70% water changes each day for that week before the plants arrived.
Now the fun part! Planting!!! I received my plants last Friday and planted on that same day which took me 8 hours of cleaning and pruning the plants and then planting(since i was the only person. Hope you enjoyed my long story and hope that you can watch my scape hopefully mature into something amazing! Here are the pics!!!!!
I'll post the plant list when I get back home!!! How everyone enjoys the first parts!! I'll keep everyone updated with acouple pics each week!
Also here is a pic of what my ei dosing will be for the first few weeks
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I really wish I would I banked the soil up more toward the back, but I'll just make up for it by trimming the plants different! Can't wait to see what a week can do!!!! 
