As promised a LONG time ago, here are some pics of the progress. Please excuse the sloppiness of the panoramics; since the tank still has another month to go before it's finished (I'm patiently waiting for the plants to grow as opposed to starting off fully stocked) I'm haven't been real concerned with appearence.
The first shot is day one. IMHO this is the best it's looked so far. It was given to me for free by my aunt and uncle who no longer wished to maintain it.
After much deliberation, I still had not decided if I wanted to go with some nice driftwood pieces or plant it fully with only small pieces in various locations. This next shot is after a week of water and about a fifth of the plants. It's pretty off balance at this point, but the system is going, and that's what was important at that moment.
Next is when everything went very, very bad. First I had to deal with ich, then I found out that some of the inhabitants had bacterial hemm. sept.; all infected died eventually. But in the meantime I drained the water down to 60% because 75 gallons is easier to treat than 125. The color of the water is the antibiotics. Otherwise the water was very nice at this point. I also decided not to do driftwood and just go with plants, but I left these three pieces in there for the bristlenose and for future inhabitants to use as cover or spawning. The plants are coming back from the dead at this point as well and I have about 4 fifths of what I have presently, but they're all babies at this point so you can't see most of them.
All of my digging around and planting plants have paid off; bring out the soup spoons and dig in. At least the Marsilea and E.tenellus are now growing well; the rest I can't even see.
In what must be the shortest recovery time ever the pea soup is clearing up. I had NOTHING plugged into an outlet except the lights; it just started clearing up on its own. The red lotus has come back from the dead, and though you can't tell in the pic, the background plants have started to grow (tiger hygro and various swords et cetera). At this point I am able to picture what it will look like once it's all grown in, which hopefully won't be more than a month. The background will have red highlights with interjections of light green and the midground will be mostly dark green. I still have not decided what fish I want, so in the meantime there are some Gambusias and a few platties and mollies that davemonkey and humbletex gave me to keep the system going.
Since the last pic I have made a few changes, such as removing the mystery Ludwigia on the left-center area and adding two amazon swords in the background that were in my son's 20 npt. I traded him with cuttings from the tiger that had been growing so nicely, but being a patient man I am cool with waiting for more growth. To stimulate this, play with wine-making skills, and to have a fun experiement with my kids, I am going to set up a DIY CO2 reactor via an easy wine recipe (4 cups sugar, 1 can juice concentrate, 1 pkg active dry yeast, 3.5 quarts water). I'll post some updated pics at the end of August.
For a list of species, since it's a big list, you can check out my profile under the main aquarium block. I amy have left a couple names off, but it gives a general idea.
Re: Setting up 125g El Natural 
Hybrid Mode
