justafish

So I decided to put up my 20 gallon tank next to my computer, so I could have something to look at while I do my work. I decided to go El Natural with this one. I started filling it up on October 17th.
Of course I did the typical substrate work at first:



The substrate is regular yard dirt. I also added a bunch of houseplant fertilizer spikes at the very bottom of the substrate. I didn't put it through the mineralizing process because I wanted to see if enough substrate on top would prevent the organic material from leaching out into the rest of the tank. I've got about 2 inches of very fine (and heavy) river silt on top of the dirt. We'll see if that's good enough. If the algae starts mimicing MDR-TB, then I'll change this tank out.

Then I grabbed a bunch of plants from another tank and ordered some online.



The plant list is as follows:
Hygrophila difformis
Myriophyllum pinnatum
Micranthemum umbrosum
Echinodorus tenellus
Microsorum pteropus
Anubias bartieri "nana"

No fauna, at least for a few weeks.
The lights are just 3 Life-Glo2 bulbs set on a timer for 6 hours a day.
CO2 is DIY, inserted via filter intake. I haven't set it up yet, maybe I'll get to it this next weekend.

justafish

On another note, I've got about 15 stems of Hygro in there, and about 15 of the Myrio as well. I'm hoping that will help with the potential for algae problems.

mudboots

Hah! Now you'll never get any work done

Post some pics once you get it set up; I like El Natural set ups a lot, though I've not used DIY CO2 or filtration except to jumpstart the plants when I first planted them and to keep the "dust" from settling while battling a pea soup outbreak a while back. Do you plan on keeping these in the setup?

justafish

Hmmm... I'm not sure whether I'm going to keep them in there. As of right now they still aren't in there, but I wanted to put them in just to clear everything up and get some roots going. I don't think I'll keep them very long though. This tank needs to be minimal in its maintenance requirements, otherwise I'll always have my hands in there instead of what I should be doing.

I think that when the semester ends for me in December I'll probably put some CO2 back in there, just because then I'll have the time to trim. And I'd like to see if I'll have to fertilize. Hopefully not.

justafish

Just a quick update on this one:
I decided not to add CO2 with a filter for a source of circulation. I want this to be minimal.

Most of the plants have died back somewhat from what they looked like straight out of the package. The E tenellus lost all of its large leaves, but there are about 15 small green leaves poking out of the dead center. Looks like it finally rooted. The M umbrosum has lost most of its leaves except for what has grown new in my tank. I think maybe it was grown under really different conditions where I bought it. The myrio looks the worst. It lost all the bottom leaves, and of course created quite a mess below.

There really isn't much of an algae problem, except for the powder algae on the glass, and some hair algae on a piece of wood. Plenty of diatoms though.

I added some RCS from another tank to prevent algae problems. They are still alive, so something must be right.

bratyboy2

i like it nice layout