Week 2
Ok, so it’s been a week and I did a WC. I was really tired today (was running on 2hrs sleep) so I forgot to measure the water perameters but I stopped by Aqua Forest since I was in SF and picked up some more plants for the tank. Keep in mind the choices for my plants are mostly based on what I think will survive in there. I’m trying to cover all the bases on aesthetics (foreground, midground, bg, and color), but this aquarium isn’t so much about looks as it is about testing out this method.
The plants are definitely doing better this week than they were last week. It seems the old leaves that were accustomed to the old water perams they were in died back and new, healthy leaves grew in place of them. I added some petite anubias nana that I had in my other fish tank. It’s going through its die-off period but I’m hoping it’ll pick up like the rest of the plants did this week. I noticed the plants had a deficiency in something that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. I figured it was calcium so I put some of that in there about 3 days ago. I don’t know if it really helped. I was really tempted to put more nutrients in there since I’m only putting it in once a week after WC but I held off because this tank is about being low-maintenance. There has been ZERO algae growth. There was a very minute amount of brown dusting on the glass but some of that was from the week before as I didn’t wipe it off to see if it would grow, die back, or stay the same. There’s some accumulation of debris on the substrate (some of it dead leaves and some of it the calcium I dosed which left white dusting everywhere).
The pic shown here is before WC and before prunning. I ended up cutting a lot of the sword leaves that were at the top of the tank and were getting burnt. So far, the java fern is the one plant not doing well. I believe this is due to the fact that it’s under direct light with a prime spot in the middle and it’s not planted in the substrate (it’s tied to the wood). I did a major pruning of it to try to encourage healthy leave growth. If it doesn’t end up picking up soon, I might stick it in my other aquarium and replace it with something else that likes a lot of light.
Ferts:
Excel 1xday
pinch of Nitrate 1xweek
pinch of Phosphate 1xweek
pinch of Potassium Sulfate 1xweek
pinch of Equilibrium 1xweek
pinch of calcium once during week
