[El Exorcisto]

Goey Pond was at one point a local village reservoir. The water in the pond has better clarity than most water I have ever found in a bottle. The fish are immaculately healthy, as is the majority of the vegetation. I fish their a bit, and with my re-immersion into aquascaping I have had an eye towards flora as much as fauna. The plan is a Goey Pond biotope. Flora is planned to be eleocharis parvula, fissidens sp., and perhaps some Potomogeton Gayi(?) which I have seen growing about 10 feet down. The substrate looks a lot like moon sand, but it is a combination consisting primarily of granite, anorthracite, and a bit of shale. This comes from a mineral vein that extends into the pond at one end, probably glacial in nature. The hardscape are granite cobbles collected from the delta of a stream that emties into Goey pond. Here is my startup, plants to follow soon.

Basic 10 gallon, sloped substrate with granite hardscape in traditional Iwagumi position.

Homebrew CO2 reactor. With a 10 gallon I cannot imagine spending the extra coin to run pressurized, or use excel for that matter.

The tank filled without lighting. I had to run out to the local Wally-World to get bulbs for the hoods. The tank is filtered with a little Fluval internal power filter, mainly for flow and CO2 dispersion more than filtration.

My light fixtures. These were originally designed for my 55 gallon but were found to be grossly inadequate.

They each hold two 26 watt compact fluorescents, with two fixtures totaling 104 watts of lighting over the tank.

Here it is with lights on. It seems nice and bright, hopefully the plants agree.

I'm hopefully hitting the pond tomorrow to get the plants for the new scape. Now I remember why I got OUT of this... FAR too addicting.

 

[Gilles]

hehe i know the feeling! Nice looking setup though!

 

[El Exorcisto]

I went up to the pond and found some plants today, along with some driftwood and rocks. The rocks are black and white granite laced with garnet crystals, very pretty. The plants in the tank are:

Fissidens Sp. (Fontanus?)
Eriocaulon Sp. (Aquaticum?)
And some stem plant, no idea what it is. I'll be heading over to the local DEC office next week to get IDs on the plants, hopefully anyway.

There was hairgrass at the pond but I suspect it's the long variety which I'm not really interested in the least. The driftwood was wrapped up in Fissidens and stacked along the back to make a quick moss wall. I was trying to make a central arrangement of driftwood but the tank is really too small to pull it off with the sticks I have. So, here it is as of five minutes ago, still a bit cloudy from the muddy roots on the plants.