mythin

Well I got bored of looking at it with no water, and I got some 15 crs shrimp in my other tank waiting for this one to get cycled, so I just filled it.

mythin

Also had to mention the oliver knott method of filling a tank is freaking awesome. No cloudiness whatsoever, and not a single leaf of UG or LB even moved.

If you arent familiar with it, you lay down a layer of seranwrap then a layer or two of news paper ontop of that, then you can do another optional layer of seranwrap, but i didnt, and then you just use a bucket and some tubing and siphon some water into the tank and let it run ontop of the news paper
and it slowly fills in. Mine stopped about half way so i was doing little half gallon containers of water after the siphon stopped, with the newspaper and stuff still in the tank. Then when it gets full you just grab the edges of the lower layer of ceranwrap and slowly crumple it all into a ball, and the ceran wrap neatly holds the newspaper and no water gets on the carpet since ceranwrap holds the water in. pretty nifty.

mythin

So its been a little over a week since I filled my tank and im already wishing I had filled it earlier. Not only because its gonna take longer to cycle, but it seems all the plants are doing better with water added. I had a little problem with rhizoclonium algae since im running 150w over 10g (15wpg?) Im sure its not actually 15wpg, probably closer to 8 or 10 with a lot of the light bleeding out. Anyways, Ive been blasting the co2, and increased my waterflow and reduced my photoperiod to about 8 hours and the rhizoclonium is about 95% gone.

Ive added a few salvinia minima to soak up some nutrients, and have a collection of foreground plants I want to use to create a grassy field type texture. As of right now I have HC, UG, LB, DHG, glosso, and one stem of downoi. I was thinking of getting maybe one more foreground plant to add for one additional texture, i was thinking maybe elantine triandra.

Heres the current look:



I know theres some gsa/gda but ive added a few MTS to take care of it. Hopefully in a week or so my ammonia will go down and I can add some ottos or something.

mythin

Well, I rescaped again. I saw that the rocks were just too small and the LB was getting pretty tall so after a while I knew i would barely be able to see the rocks so I just did another 180 and pulled up all the rocks and the lb, and the glosso lol. I mentioned in my first rescape that im pretty fickle, it takes very little for me to dislike something (im an artist by trade), so i pulled everything up and rescaped it.

The good news is Ive pretty much licked the algae problem for now, and the oto's cleaned all the algae off the glass. The only thing I can see is that in the back left corner of my tank against the glass under the substrate line I can see BGA (cyanobacteria) forming... I dont know what I should do about it, Its only right against the glass and right under the substrate.

This is how the tank currently looks.

Flora:
UG
Xmas moss(i think)
petco moss(this is off their moss ball, def dont know what kind of moss it is, its not java/xmas/taiwan)
Fissdens Fontanus
HC
Rotala mini type I

Fauna:
Low grade CRS (a/b)
3 Oto's

mythin

Little Update.

Looks like theres some diatoms on my UG, but its probably apart of the NTS so hopefully it will be gone soon. ALL my crs seem to be happy and doing well, I got my chiller in so they are nice and coool now.

Tank parameters:
Nitrite: 0
Ammonia: 0
Nitrate: 0
KH: 2-3
GH: 7
ph: 6.4
temp: 74-75F

mythin

Still growing in. Added some new mosses (true weeping and flame)

discuskid

very nice tank mythin , i just set up a 45p about a week ago

armedbiggiet

nice setup but watch out forthe UG as they get aggressive later.

mythin

A much needed update:

discuskid

Looks great! that UG looks amazing