So I decided a little while ago that I wanted to see how well I would go with a planted tank. I always found them to be quite calming and as this tank would be in my bedroom thought I would just go for it. Sold a few of my fish to fund the effort and free up a couple of tanks to move the remaining fish into and with some time off over Christmas made a start.
I think I worked it out that this tank is now on its 6th iteration since i got it a couple of years ago so it will be interesting to see whether this holds my interest.
I didn't really have any sort of idea on how the hardscape would end up looking - I figured I had a heap of materials laying around and I had started to stockpile my plants that I wanted to use.
My least favourite part of a rescape is changing the substrate - I always make a mess and end up cursing my decision about half way through. I kept most of the sand though in case I needed it to cap the more "plant friendly" substrate that I was going to use.
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So with an empty glass box I used a bag of Fluval Stratum that my brother had laying around spare (so free for me ) as the substrate just incase down the line I decide that I want to put some stem plants that require a bit better substrate than just river sand and capped it with said river sand. After half filling the tank I decided it needed a cap as the stratum is very light and plants were more difficult to plant.
The hardscape was made up of rocks and wood that I had laying around from previous efforts to get the "right look" for this tank.
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Cloudy water as per usual but realised that my rock/wood pile looked pretty nice and it was all starting to take shape in my head.
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Time to plant the Vallis, Crypt and couple of sword plants that I had and a couple of stem plants (no idea what type of plant it was but it was floating around in another attempted planted tank from a while back) and check on a couple of the very nice pieces of anubius I got off Terry (Thanks mate!!).
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The water started to clear up surprisingly quick. And judging by this picture I took 1 shoe off (such a weird slant).
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From here I added the other anubius that wasnt going to be tied or glued into place ie. its just been shoved into cracks in the rocks.
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So I left it from there overnight a) because I wanted the sand to settle a bit more and it had taken me almost a full day to get to this point.
Edited by Voodoo, 12 January 2017 - 01:35 PM.