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gardenman

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Everything posted by gardenman

  1. gardenman
    The way modern shipping works is from a hub design. You could live right next door to the Coop and if your plants were shipped they'd still go to the regional hub before working their way back to you. It seems a bit screwy at times, but it's the most efficient method for shippers.
  2. gardenman
    UV lights are potentially very good, but need to be used right. The flow rate through the light needs to be right. Too fast and there's not enough time for the UV light to kill any pathogens in the water. The bulbs dim fairly quickly and typically need to be replaced on a yearly basis. Exposure time to the UV light and the light intensity needs to be right for them to be effective. I typically see them used more in koi ponds, but that's more for algae control than fish health. If there are no harmful pathogens currently in your water, then there's nothing you gain from using a UV light. Commercial stores use UV lights because often all of their tanks are on one system and they're constantly adding new fish to the system. There's not so much a risk of infection as a certainty of it. Even the simple act of netting fish for customers can spread disease from one tank to another. For them, UV lights make sense. For a typical home aquarist, not so much.
  3. gardenman
    I had a raft of Java Moss in my thirty high that was surrounding my spray bar from my canister filter. It was the width of the tank, stretched across half of the top of the tank and was about six inches deep (top to bottom) when I finally had enough and weeded out most of it. If you have a spray bar in your tank, try wedging some behind it. Chances are it'll like that spot and grow like crazy there.
  4. gardenman
    Mine are pretty carnivorous and love freeze-dried tubifex worms and shrimp pellets also.
  5. gardenman
    If you're handy you can build your own cover. I do it for all of my tanks now. I use the 11.25" X 3/4" X 8' PVC trim boards from Lowes (around $45 when not on sale.) I cut them down to form a rectangle the size of the aquarium. glue the boards together using PVC cement (the same stuff used for PVC pipes.) I use some PVC quarter-round molding an inch or so down from the top and then glue on a piece of clear acrylic atop the quarter-round molding. I've lost fish (an Oscar and arowana) when they've jumped and injured themselves by hitting a solid glass top, so this gives fish about eight inches or so of jumping room between the top of the water and the glass/acrylic. I cut a door on the front (typically that lifts up but I have tried a side opening one also) and then just set whatever light I'm using on top of the acrylic. I have good access to the aquarium. The fish can jump and not get injured. Humidity is contained inside the cover. The PVC never rots or decays. I just find it to be the best solution. Here's a couple of photos of one of mine. One with the door closed and one with it open.
  6. gardenman
    You could also try taking a damp sponge or paper towel and simply wipe the leaves with it in the hope that you'd physically remove any snail eggs or baby snails on the leaves.
  7. gardenman
    It's hard to know which way is up on a lily bulb when you plant it. I use the "nature knows best" method and drop it in the tank and see how it falls. I figure Mother Nature knows that it should fall root side down so however it lands is how I plant it. I ordered mine from the Coop on January first. It took about a week to get here so it's been in the tank for about a month and looks largely the same. It's not growing but it's also not rotting, so I just try to be patient with it and see what happens. I have rotated it so the presumed bottom is up, but we'll see if that makes any difference. Mine got pretty cool during shipment. It came with no heat pack or insulation and the nighttime temps were in the twenties. The plants in the box were 58-60 degrees when I opened it. The plants are all doing fine but the lily just sits there. I check it out every few days and it'll either grow or rot. It's just a question of waiting to see which it does.
  8. gardenman
    Larger puffers seem to be very interested in saving energy. They're pretty much the couch potatoes of the fish world. I suspect that part of that is due to the fact that their typical prey isn't especially elusive. If you can't chase down a snail, well, you've got problems. Snails, crabs, crayfish, freshwater clams, aren't especially elusive and hard to catch so puffers can just hang out and wait for a meal to meander by rather than be off chasing down something fast and hard to catch. They aren't especially streamlined like a barracuda, and speed isn't their greatest asset. Though they can put on a short burst of speed when prompted. They seem to be on the evolutionary path to becoming something like a marine angler fish or frogfish that just sits in one spot and waits for a meal to wander in range.
  9. gardenman
    Freshwater now, but I've done saltwater in the past. I've never done the reef type aquariums.
  10. gardenman
    I'm 62 and I've had fish tanks since I was about six. I've bought literally hundreds of books and magazines on fish keeping over the years. I may have paid for a house, well maybe a car anyway, for Dr. Herbert Axelrod (A Tropical Fish Hobbyist writer.) PBS used to have a show on aquariums that I watched, way, way back. I still watch nearly every YouTuber on aquariums. Some local fish stores (Tropical Fish Island in Mantua, NJ being one of my old favorites back in the sixties/seventies) were very good at sharing information and educating customers. Mary Ann, one of the owners would perform caesarians on pregnant livebearers that had died to save their babies. Many livebearers simply carry their eggs inside them and even when the mother dies, the babies still live inside her on their yolk sac. If you can get them out after the mother dies you can often save the babies. I've kept just about everything at one time or another. Experience is a great teacher. I've had lots of experience, good and bad. Aquarium keeping is part art, part science, and quite an adventure. I still learn new stuff every now and then. I've probably shopped in fifty or more (likely more) pet shops over the years. I've seen many come and go. I've used pretty much every type of filter ever made. I now tend to keep things simple. Lots of plants, good food, and you get happy, healthy fish.
  11. gardenman
    Can you increase the rate of CO2 to compensate for off-gassing from the sponge filter? Sure. Do you need the CO2 at all though? If your plants are doing well now, you probably don't. "They'll grow faster with CO2!" Faster growth isn't always a good thing. It simply means you'll need to be in there more weeding things out and trimming plants back. CO2 is great if you're trying to grow exotic stuff, or raise plants commercially, but for many/most home aquariums it's not absolutely necessary. I'm of the belief that there are two types of aquariums. There are the plant-centric aquariums where plants are the focus and the more exotic the plant the better. (The ADA and Iwagumi styles) The plant-centric tanks tend to have very few fish and they're just accessories more than the focus. There are the fish-centric tanks where the fish are the focus and plants are secondary. Some plant-centric tanks don't run any filter at all and their entire focus is on having a perfectly aquascaped tank. I'm more fish-centric. I grow whatever plants grow in my tanks (and boy do they grow!) without much outside help. I've got water sprite, some jungle val, java fern, java moss (lots of java moss), anubias nana petite, I'm experimenting with pogostemon (so far so good) and a variety of crypts (so far so good also,) and dwarf sag. The top of the tanks are covered with lots of floaters, red root floaters, frogbit, salvinia minima, and duckweed. I spend about an hour a week weeding out junk now with no CO2. If I added CO2 I'd likely be weeding out more stuff more frequently.
  12. gardenman
    Etsy, ebay, and aquabid all have red root floaters available.
  13. gardenman
    The most commonly sold aquatic plant seeds are a hygrophila species, regardless of how they're labeled. This isn't necessarily bad as you can get a lot of plants for very little money and they grow fairly well. I've never seen real anubias seeds offered for sale. You may find some seeds labeled as anubias from unscrupulous sellers, but in all likelihood you're getting hygrophila. Aquarium seeds are very much a buyer beware area these days.
  14. gardenman
    Feeding them is the big key to me. Mine love freeze-dried tubifex worms, green beans, shrimp pellets and more. Males will claim a cave and try to woo a female. If the female approves she'll go in, lay her eggs and the male will fan them and care for them. They're easy to breed. Fry eat what the parents do so they're easy to raise. They're neat fish.
  15. gardenman
    I use aluminum window screening to cover my stock tanks. (I do keep one uncovered to raise some mosquito larva for the fish.) The window screening is strong enough to form around the stock tank and keep stuff out. I just bend it to fit. Easy-peasy. It wouldn't hold up a child or anything much bigger than a cat, but it works for me. If you need something stronger you can build a wood frame for some hardware cloth that would be stronger.
  16. gardenman
    I have two 110 gallon stock tanks that I use to hold most of the rainfall. That's 220 gallons right there. They are used to water the plants on and around my front porch and front yard. I've got four 30 gallon trash cans out back for the plants in my back yard. I have overflows built into my system so the excess runs off to a safe spot where I don't mind it going. I use some to keep my water garden topped off also. It's better to have too much water on hand than not enough. The amount of water you collect will vary depending on the square footage of your home and the efficiency of your gutters, but you can collect a lot of water in a very short time. Oatey makes a Mystic Rainwater Collection System that you cut into your downspouts to collect the rainwater and they work very well. If you're just looking at stockpiling aquarium water for the garden then a stock tank would be a good receptacle for it. They're pretty affordable. The 110 gallon ones I bought at Tractor Supply were about $70 each when I bought them. You can also use them as a breeding pond should the need arise or if you have a tank failure at any point and need a place to house some fish.
  17. gardenman
    I just checked to see the yearly rainfall here and we get about 46" per year, so at 466 gallons per inch of rain that would be a bit over 21,000 gallons a year of rain water just from my smallish roof. You can collect a whole lot of water from your roof.
  18. gardenman
    I've been collecting rainwater for my garden for years and your bigger issue will be what to do with all of that rainwater. My house has a footprint of about 748 sq. ft. One inch of rain is 0.08333 ft. of rain. So I end up with about 62.33 cubic feet of rainwater whenever it rains an inch. One cubic foot of water is about 7.48 gallons. So for one inch of rain it collects about 466 gallons of water. And we get an inch of rain fairly regularly here. You need to account for how to handle the overflow when your storage tanks get full. The distance to the rainwater storage shouldn't be an issue unless your aquariums are in the basement. Whatever you use for rainwater storage will likely be on or under the ground. Assuming your tanks are taller than the rainwater inlets then gravity will carry the aquarium water to the storage tanks. Even a smallish pump that you can connect to a garden hose like the transfer pumps ($50-ish) should be more than adequate if you need a pump to move the water.
  19. gardenman
    Those who used it said it was very reliable, but it had to be installed when you were setting up the tank and couldn't be added later. That limited it's market appeal. Planted tanks weren't as popular back then either. It's one of those products that was around before its time. A few companies are keeping it alive, mostly overseas, but it has some pretty big advantages over conventional aquarium heating, especially for planted tanks. I wouldn't be shocked to see it return to the US marketplace at some point. Those who used it back in the day raved about it. It makes sense also. If you want invisible heating, it's a good option. Assuming you can find it these days.
  20. gardenman
    You don't hear about under substrate heating these days but it had a brief period where it was popular. You could buy the heating cables and controllers at most online sites, but they're pretty much all gone now. JBL still makes the heating cables and controllers, but they're more sold in England/Europe than the US these days. It was considered the best way to heat a tank for a while. It promoted plant growth, the bottom heat was gentle and invisible. It was a neat option, but like lots of stuff, it never quite caught on. Companies still make heat cables, but you'd have to DIY a system now as the plug and play stuff is largely gone unless you have a source for JBL products. A company called Aqua One makes their Thermo-Sub heating system but I can't find it anyplace. If you Google "Under substrate aquarium heating" you can find many articles about it dating back twenty years or more. Since heat rises in an aquarium the coolest part of most tanks is the substrate. That's not always ideal for plants that like to be warm. Heating the substrate radiated heat throughout the tank and kept the substrate the warmest. It also created convection currents through the substrate circulating water through the substrate.
  21. gardenman
    I always like to put an algae covered plant, rock, or piece of decor in with baby fish so they have something to graze on when I'm not feeding them. Baby fish process food very quickly and unless you're feeding them every couple of hours, which is very hard to do, you're apt to starve some of them. Something that's heavily crusted in algae likely has lots of other stuff living in it also, so it gives baby fish more of a fighting chance for food whenever they want it.
  22. gardenman
    I like the way you cut the soda bottles to make the containers. I may have to try that. Mind if I ask what substrate you use? I'm assuming it's the same you use in your aquarium and not a conventional potting soil, but I could be wrong.
  23. gardenman
    Something to consider is the size of the return plumbing. While you need a powerful pump, a lot of the power requirements of that pump will vary depending on the size of the return plumbing. A smaller diameter return requires a less powerful pump. If you're using something really small, like airline tubing as the return, a very small pump can generate the lift you need as there's a very small volume of water you're lifting. If you're using three inch PVC as the return you're trying to push up a much larger volume of water. A smaller diameter return line will need a less powerful pump than a larger diameter return line because there's less water it has to push up the pipe. Volume matters. Most of the sizing charts you'll find for pumps will be based on the recommended pipe diameter. If you go up in diameter, you'll lose vertical lift. If you go down in size, you'll gain vertical lift, but put a bit more strain on the pump. Pond websites tend to have lots of information on pump discharge heights and flow rates. Some people build really tall fountains and waterfalls and need that information.
  24. gardenman
    In general with plants, leaves are power plants. As long as they're green and alive they are giving the plant more energy. In an odd quirk, at least with terrestrial plants I can't say for sure about aquatic plants, even seemingly dead leaves/stems that aren't actively decaying can provide resources to the living plant. A lot of perennial plants store food in the form of carbohydrates in the seemingly dead plant stems and then draw on that food stored in those stems over the winter/non-growing season. A lot of gardeners cut everything back to the ground after the first frost, but doing so can take away that stored energy the plant may need over the winter.
  25. gardenman
    Something that's been done in the past, but you don't hear about it much anymore is undergravel heating. A rubberized heating element is laid in the middle of the gravel bed and connected to an external thermostat. A temperature probe in the water monitors the water temp and turns on and off the heating element as needed. You put it in the middle of the gravel as if you put it right against the bottom glass it tends to lose too much heat to the glass. By putting a half inch or so of gravel under it, the heat goes into the tank more. The site The Spruce Pets has an article about Aquarium Substrate Heating if you're intrigued. I don't know if anyone still sells the kits made for aquariums, but you can buy heat tapes, thermostat and cobble together something on your own if you're really feeling adventurous. In either case I'd strongly recommend using a GFCI circuit for the heater. That should help prevent you electrocuting yourself or your fish.
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