eemeli

I now have a tank with lots of plants in it. Yay!

I ended up sort of mineralising the soil: I let it soak overnight, then manually squeezed it in handfuls & spread it out to dry in our living room. However, it took so long to dry that I only had time to soak it a second time & use it wet in the aquarium.


My assistants are included only to give an indication of size.

As I didn't want the bottom to be flat, I went and got a bunch of rock slates from the local hardware store that I piled into hills. I have no idea how badly erosion will wash things down, but I guess we'll see.


The hill on the right has only partly been covered in gravel at this stage. Using these irregular pieces was rather fun, kind of a pity they'll all (hopefully) stay hidden. The tacky background came with the tank, we'll be replacing it with something better once we figure out what we want.


The soil I lay on wet; estimating the depth was a bity tricky, but based on the volume of the two bucketfuls I used, on average there's now 2cm of soil. Sand was similar (also wet, as it's the old sand from the aquarium), but there's maybe 3cm of it on average.

The sand also, it seems, comes pre-populated with Malayan trumpet snails.


And now I have perhaps a dozen different types of plants planted. About half are previous tenants, the rest from a local shop. I'll have to look them up eventually, for now I'll wait and see if they survive. I filled the tank first to the top of the hills, planted everything, then took out the dirty water before filling it up.

Since that last photo, I've set up the external filter (Eheim Professional II) and a heater. I tried also adding one of the internal filters for some added flow, but that seemed too much so I took it out. The water's cleared up significantly since then, I'll think about another water change tomorrow if it looks necessary.

Tex Gal

You're on your way! I'll be interested in your progress! BTW love your assistants !

eemeli

So, an update on my 540-liter tank, which seems to be doing rather well.

First of all, here's a photo album of my progress so far. I've recently reorganised the layout (again), and I'll probably fiddle with it sometime soon again. My main problem for now seems to be that some plant species grow too well, and I need to trim something in the tank every week or two. I've also set up a 128-liter tank at my work as a NPT, with the same "problem".

There are I think about 20 or so different plant species in the tank for now, which is perhaps a few too many. I have a few different kinds of vallisneria and other grass-like plants growing, and I figure if they grow well I might concentrate on them a bit more. Recently I had to remove a tiger lotus as it was shading a third of the tank with its leaves.

For fish, I've five male ancistrus (probably cirrhosus), four cockatoo dwarf cichlids (one male), seven siamese algae eaters and just recently I added a school of 17 cherry barbs that seem to have adopted the four ember tetras that I was never able to catch when I moved the rest of their school to the tank at work. I feed the fish perhaps once a day, mostly with frozen artemia, krill or mysis, occasionally with flakes. The fish seem to like all of it, and seem to be doing well.

There's also a population of cherry shrimp (maybe 100, hard to tell, with a range on colours from near-transparent grayish-green to bright cherry red) and plenty of snails (ramshorn snails, common bladder snails, Malaysian trumpet snails, and assassin snails to control the preceding). Especially the MTSs used to swarm the aquarium glass, and I was able to count perhaps 200 on the glass at the same time. Manually collecting and discarding them repeatedly helped, and the assassin snails seem to keep their population to a reasonable level nowadays.

For a few months I had issues with too much visible back tuft algae, but trimming heavily on the Java ferns and removing a couple of sword plants completely helped. You can see the plants in question here.

As for tech, I'd guess that what I have qualifies for "low-tech": I have lamps (4x58W T8) and a single Eheim 2048 internal filter that nominally pumps 600 l/h, but it's old so the real rate is probably a bit less than that. The filter's two media containers are filled one with a sponge, the other with a bag of Sera Phosvec Granulat that I added when I measured my phosphate levels and realised they were off the scale -- I'm pretty sure it's the peat in the soil that's to blame.

I've changed the water (well, maybe 1/3 at most) a couple of times early on to combat cloudiness and to reduce the phosphate levels, other than that the only time I've taken water out has been to set up a quarantine tank for new arrivals. Also, the cloudiness disappeared pretty much completely when I got rid of the peppered corys that I got along with the tank; they really liked to dig up the bottom.

Our tapwater's rather soft and I only treat it with Sera Aquatan (water conditioner), so the water in the tank stay rather soft and neutral as well (GH 2, KH 2, PH 6.5). Occasionally I measure ammonia, nitrates and nitrites, but during the whole life of the tank I've not managed to get anything more than a nominal reading on any of those.

Given that the only way to keep an aquarium that I've now experience with gives me results like these, I have a really hard time understanding regimes that require constantly changing the water and otherwise messing with the ecosystem. Also, as my wife puts it, having gotten used to this feature of our living room for a few months now, most aquariums look really bare -- where are all the plants?

Michael

I couldn't agree more!

maxthedog123

Yes! When I first got into plants, of course they all started wilting. Following the advice on a few forums, I soon had T5HO lights, injected CO2 and plenty of ferts. I had unreal plant growth, but I got tired of trimming tanks 2x per week!! I discovered the NPT/El Natural/Walstad/Dutch/old-Innes "balanced aquarium" method and I knew it was for me. I have 5 aquariums now - 3 true NPT tanks and 2 that I will call semi-NPT and I love it. I am very busy - I love my aquariums, but I don't have time to devote 10 hours/week to aquarium maintenance.

The only thing I miss from the high tech CO2 days is being able to have enough plants to decide on Monday I wanted to set up a new tank and having enough outgrowth by Thursday or Friday to fully plant a new tank. Things go much slower in the NPT world, but I like it.