So my girlfriend bought me this tank for my birthday back in September.
After having it sit in a corner of my house for a few months I decided to finally set it up after I sold my riparium
Here's how it sits now
This was my inspiration for the scape
The tank has azoo substrate and ohko stone I bought from a club member a few months ago. Lighting will be my 11x3watt LED set up I ran over my riparium. I'm doing an HC dry start for now. The plan is to have HC pretty much everywhere and some fissidens or mini pelia on the rocks. I still have to get my co2 stuff so I'm waiting on that before I plant the rest of the HC (Still have 3 pots)
The mound is actually mostly rock with a 1 inch layer of soil. Once I flood it I'll leave it be for a month before I add any animals so that the hc has time to take hold.
I filled it in because I was getting impatient. Planted some HC on the slopes too. Hopefully they stick and grow because in some places, there's not a very thick layer of soil before it hits the rock. now I just need some moss
ok so the hc did not fare very well because my light wasn't putting off the right spectrum. I've added some 2700k and 4500k white LEDs to counter balance the 10000k whites i've had on it and so far it's doing better.
I removed all the HC, and got some Mini Pelia and fissidens in and glued onto the rocks. I'm going to get some more HC this weekend and do another dry start.
the plan is to have HC all along the bottom and the mosses on the mountains. Need more moss too
I'm not sure if this form of "graffiti'' has hit your city yet, but with Vancouver being so full of art student/hipsters, you can randomly find words and pictures on the sides of buildings from people who do this.
They blend the moss with water and nutrients (probably old tank water) and add a little bit of buttermilk (not exactly sure what that does) and then they use a brush and paint words like "Love" and "Beautiful" or whatever on the sides of buildings. Secretly at night they mist them and then randomly like a couple weeks later there is a word on the side of a building ''painted'' in moss...
Pics: https://www.google.ca/search?rlz=1C....,cf.osb&fp=c945e1bdc8e076ff&biw=1366&bih=667
I've seen the article on those moss paintings, pretty cool.
I chopped up the moss with some scissors and just sprinkled them all over the substrate. My worries is that it won't stay down once flooded and the moss will just float up into the tank. The moss thats on the rocks is glued on now.
ok, so I attempted to do what YouJettisonMe did and have the mini pelia grow on the substrate directly, but after reading zeldar's journal, although initially successful, the MP eventually started floating away from the substrate, not what I want to do after having grown it out for so long.
I tied it all to stainless steel mesh and placed them all along the top of my mountains instead and the rest is glued to the rocks so they're not going anywhere.
I also added the elatine hydropiper from Raymond, really cool plant. It's yellowing a little because I was out of town for 4 days and was unable to spritz it (plus my spritz bottle broke)
My HC is growing in nicely too
And finally a FTS. I'm moving to SF in May so this tank will remain dry start until then. I don't want to set it all up to only have to tear it down in a few weeks.
i'm not sure it will look natural later with the steel mesh
if you go with dry start method why not just put the moss there? it will cling nicely by itself
the moss will cover all of the mesh so that no steel can be seen. the moss will cling to the soil, it's just that it'll probably very very easily uproot itself once it grows in a little thicker. The soil already isn't the heaviest substrate. It might work if I went with a heavier substrate like akadama.
Thanks! I'm hoping to have this ready by the IAPLC deadline so I'm going to flood it, the plants grow faster submersed. I'm going to crank the co2 to deathly levels to help with the transition and then throw some fish in there on the last few days. Crunch time!
I just finished moving and I set the tank up in my new apartment. A lot of they hydropiper melted unfortunately so I just went and got 4 more pots of HC to fill in the rest of the tank. I'm hoping everything will fill in nicely by IAPLC... 23 days to go!
I'm going to be doing daily waterchanges for the next week. I don't know if the azoo plant grower soil leaches ammonia like aquasoil does but I figure the more water changes the better. Plus now that I'm in SF, I get the experience the amazing hetch hetchy water!
Ok so I reset the tank. The azoo soil was not doing very well for me and I was getting non stop BGA. I think because the azoo soil just buffers pH down and doesn't actually have any nitrogen in it. I wasn't dosing my nitrogren at EI levels since I assumed the soil would release some (as aquasoil does).
I tore it down, and refilled it with aquasoil powder type. Never used powder before but it fits with the scale of the tank. I also replaced my cal aqua lab outflow with an ada mini p-2 lily pipe. While the aqualab pipe looks great, the flow gets pointed downwards, and in a shallow tank like this, all it was doing was blowing the soil around.
I tried to reset the scape the same way I had it but couldn't get it just right. I think I like this one better anyhow!
On to pics!
Boo, it has the new logo
Wish this was Amano's signature!
Stuck some stems behind one of the mountains to soak up excess nutrients. I think it's rotala sp. vietnam
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