Jump to content

JDCNY

Members
  • Posts

    13
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Feedback

    0%

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

JDCNY's Achievements

Apprentice

Apprentice (3/14)

  • First Post
  • Collaborator
  • Reacting Well
  • Conversation Starter
  • Week One Done

Recent Badges

9

Reputation

  1. Quick update on how the tub is looking about a week in. My son really got into helping set it up. It ended up with a bit more hardscape than I had originally planned, but he's excited and that's what counts. As you can see, the salvinia is super happy already and going gangbusters. All the plants are clippings from my indoor aquariums or house plants, plus some moss my son scraped off of the patio. I'll probably add some water wisteria and/or water lettuce down the road. And sometime in June, I'll add the killifish eggs and see what happens. I'm hoping the magic of summer tub green water and infusoria will be perfect for the tiny fry.
  2. I'm curious. Has anyone tried raising killifish eggs in a summer tub? I'm planning on doing a little experiment in a 15 gallon rubbermaid tub (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000I1M85G/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1). I'm getting it set up now as nights are just starting to warm up in the northeast. I have a small fountain pump from homedepot that I put in a plastic pot with holes in the bottom. Pebbles go in the pot, then some course sponge, and I'll use the pump and some old tubing to make a bit of water feature. The flow of the water through the rocks/sponge will add filtration and oxygenate the water. From there, my plan is to throw clippings from my indoor aquariums in there (rotala, ludwigia, guppy grass), toss in salvinia, maybe add a peace lily for some above water interest and let it go green. After that, I'll toss in one or two of those eggs-in-peat-moss packets you see on ebay and see what happens. Worse case, I'm out $20 on the eggs and I have a sweet breeding pond for my endlers, white clouds, or CPDs.
  3. Mine seem to grow extremely fast with Easy Green and Fluval stratum. If you cut them just above a node where the leaves come out, you'll get two new stalks that come out of the cut. If you get into a decent cutting routine and do it regularly, they'll get bushy pretty quickly. Plus, planting the trimmed part next to it pretty much doubles your bushiness. I find that the trimmed tops grow even faster than bottoms and in that case you may just have an inch or two of stem and with a nice leaf cluster on top.
  4. I thought about it briefly, but with the 120 gallon tank, that's a lot of RO to deal with. And then you have to add stuff back into it. It gets very time consuming and very expensive very quickly. I decided I don't have the patience (or money) to deal with it and so I do my best to research plants and livestock that are more likely to survive in harder water. My water does have it's advantages though. It's great for shrimp and snails and livebearers and it's incredibly stable since the hardness acts as a buffer preventing pH changes. Once you find stuff that thrives in it, you'll have it forever. (To be fair, I can only speak to the animals as I haven't been focused on plants for that long).
  5. I had similar issues a few months back which forum folks were able help me figure out: My water is also extremely hard with a pH well over 8 out of the tap. I get crust on everything. I even have to take my heaters out and scrape off build up every so often. At first, I thought this was why I couldn't keep plants, but it really turned out to be a nutrient thing in my case. In that water and without CO2 I am now growing anubias, swords, val, sag, salvinias, java ferns, guppy grass, ludwigia, and rotala. Based on advice from the forums, I started dosing with Easy Green and also Flourish Potassium and that combo has made all the difference for me. For the swords and other rooted plants, I also use the Easy root tabs.
  6. Thank you for the advice. Since there's no live stock, I drained the tank and planted the stems one at a time. It was a PITA so I can't imagine doing it in a fully flooded tank! When all was said and done, I ended up using a third less ludwigia and probably only half of the rotala. Despite cutting down on the total quantity, it actually looks more full and lush now that it's planted properly. I figure I'll have to do it at least once more after the emerged leaves melt back and the new submerged ones grow. We shall see.
  7. I could use some advice on a freshly planted 15 inch cube (~15 gal) and my first real aquascaping attempt after a long time fish keeping and a short time keeping live plants beyond the occasional low maintenance one that managed to survive my ignorance. It's a low tech tank that I'm not planning on heating planted with anubias (barteri and petite), crypt wendtii, java fern, ludwigia deep red, rotala nanjenshan, and salvinias. I've grown all of the plants in other tanks, but the stem plants are new to me. My hope is that they'll grow faster and thus help consume excess nutrients, keeping things balanced and filtered in such a small tank. This is assuming I can keep them alive! I have them in the back corner of the tank and though the tank is 15 inches deep, I raised the substrate in the back so that they are in ~8-10 inches of water and directly beneath the light (Nicrew Reef 30). The crypts and the anubias are in deeper water and more shaded areas. Substrate in the back is Fluval Stratum with a thin top of natural gravel. I dose with Easy Green and Seachem Potassium. I have the Easy Root Tabs too but wasn't planning on using them with the Stratum substrate. I have one of Cory's small sponge filters that I had running in another tank to get it "cycled" and I added some beneficial bacteria, but beyond that the tank is brand new. Aside from one ramshorn snail, there's no livestock and I don't plan on adding any until I'm sure I've gotten the plants well established. I'm a little worried that I planted the rotala too densely (see photos). Should they be thinned out or spread out more to allow the light to penetrate and provide more circulation? Too be honest, I was going to go with only ludwigia in the back and had only researched that. The owner of my LFS talked me into the rotala as a nice contrasting plant, but now that I'm looking into it, I'm concerned that it might not be the best fit for my aquarium since my water is hard, my pH is high, and I wasn't planning on heating the tank. I explained all of this when buying and in general, they have never steered me wrong and have always sold me super healthy plants and fish so fingers crossed. That said, any advice to help me give these plants the best chance at survival is appreciated.
  8. Since it's been two weeks I wanted to report back. Basically, my plants are looking MUCH healthier. My Anubias are loving it and have all grown new leaves. The guppy grass has stopped dying back and is putting out roots and starting to grow again. The java ferns seem to be coming back as well though they were pretty sad so it may take a bit to know for sure. They did have quite a few little plantlets (a sign of stress I've learned) that I have taken and am trying to propagate in a small 5 gallon that I've set up to experiment and hopefully learn. I was somewhat shocked to learn that some plants that I had planted in the back of my tank over a year ago that I thought had completely died out have now started growing. It was so long ago that I don't remember what they are, but I'm thinking either vals or amazon swords. To recap what I've been doing: large water change weekly (roughly 1/3) to turn around old tank syndrome since I'd been basically just topping off forever. (I figure I'll drop this down to bi-weekly at some point, but everybody seems to like the fresh water so I'm going with it for now.) 6 pumps of Easy Green after the water change. 1 pump of Easy Green each day when not doing a water change. Thought here being to spread out the dosing so that the slower growing plants don't get outcompeted by the fast-growing ones. 1 capful of Seachem Potassium after each water change and 1 capful mid-week.
  9. I've heard that it's a good idea to trim off the bad leaves so the plant doesn't have to waste resources on them. I imagine that's only assuming that there are at least 1 or 2 good leaves to provide photosynthesis. If all the leaves are bad, I shouldn't cut them all off, right? Are bad leaves better than no leaves?
  10. Thank you gardenman. It sounds like there may well be hope even though my pH, KH, and GH are really high if I can get my nutrients right. I think I probably over-reacted and tried too many things at once. I saw the co-op video on Old Tank Syndrome and immediately upped my water changes since I'd been mostly just topping off. I saw elsewhere in the forum that potassium may well be what my guppy grass was missing, so I started dosing that. I saw the co-op video on Easy Green so I started dosing that too. It was only then that I thought, "Hmm... maybe I should establish a baseline and do this a bit more scientifically so I have some clue as to what works and what doesn't." Any other recommendations on plants that do ok with high pH, KH, and GH?
  11. Fish Folk, (1) Just for clarity... is your Odyssea a reef light? Sounds like it’s _not_ but just checking. I _think_ it's a reef light. It's a T5-72 with 4 High Output 6500k 80w T5s and blue moonlight LEDs (which I think is just for coral??). (2) Given that your 120 is a nice big tank, is it possible that the PAR isn’t sufficient to throw light through the water to the bottom? Sorry, too much of a n00b to know what PAR means. The guppy grass is floating, so it's definitely getting light and I was hoping the anubias and the java moss didn't need much light. I know if I leave the lights no too long, they started growing algae on the leaves, though these days the shrimp and snails make short work of that. (3) Do you have some added air flow in the tank? I have two large airstones going at either end of the tank and a decent amount of surface agitation from my filter outflow so ... yes?? James Black, Thank you, I will check those out now! And sorry, no Angels. LOL! To be totally honest, I always had angels growing up (my folks had a water softener), but I had no luck with them in this tank in a previous incarnation. I was under the assumption that they didn't like the hard water. Also, don't want them to snack on my endlers and shrimp!
  12. I have a 120 gallon tank with a 6 ft - 4 bulb Odyssea lighting system that was gifted to me when a friend made the switch to salt water. The tank has been up and running for several years and does great from a livestock perspective. Substrate is just gravel, though it's been in there for years. I have well water which is very hard and so I went with fish species that like that: I have a thriving Endler colony, cherry and blue dream shrimp, amano shrimp, bamboo shrimp, cory cats, kulhi loaches (not that they love hard water to be fair), and various snail species. All of which are doing great. The plants on the other hand... I have one Anubia that I inherited with the tank that is doing great (it was even pearling last night) and a couple of anubia nana plants that managed to barely survive and now seem to be ok. I have a couple of very sickly java ferns that have been surviving or a year or so but only just. I also have some guppy grass which nearly all melted, then came back gang-busters, then melted again, and is now I think re-growing. Red root floaters die quickly although salvinia minima seems to be doing OK. Hornwort struggled for a bit, made a huge mess, nearly died, grew back, made another huge mess, and finally died. Java moss is nearly dying out, but there are a few stringy patches here and there that are hanging on. I even killed duckweed somehow! I thought, OK, buy some Anubias and go with that, but the very nice looking ones I got from Co-op were dead within 2 days in my tank. I left the rhizomes in hoping they were converting and might somehow grow a new leaf, but they just turned to mush. Using Tetra 6-in-1 test strips... My water out of the tap: Nitrates: 0 Nitrites: 0 Hardness (GH): 150 Chlorine: 0 KH: 300 pH: 8.1 In the tank, the only difference is the Nitrates which are around 80ppm. I dosed with Easy Green and Seachem Potassium and clearly overdid it because I was suddenly getting a lot of algae growth and nitrates went through the roof. So I did a big water change and that brought it DOWN to 80ppm. I'm currently waiting on a calcium test kit to see whether my hardness is calcium or magnesium. Do I have any hope of growing healthy plants with this water? It seems like it's not very conducive to plant life. Or perhaps more likely, I'm just blaming my ineptitude on my tap.
×
×
  • Create New...