[Show Your Garden Pics]

@ShmatyOur garden still hasn't recovered from the winter, there's nothing to even show for it. Plus, it gets increasingly difficult to maintain it all every year. Sometimes I feel that it is easier to order flowers through specialized services like https://myglobalflowers.com/ Thank you so much for sharing. You have so many animals there and it's so beautiful, and incredibly cool!

[10ppm Phosphates in my tap water!]

On 10/4/2021 at 3:52 PM, Fish Folk said:

This might be helpful…

For me, I’d just deal with it by letting plants absorb what Phosphate is made available in tap. Every once in a while, dose E.M. Erythromycin lightly to crush incipient Cyanobacteria. 

Hi and thank you for sharing! I understand this situation - "let it be", when you got 10 ppm, it's irrelevant. But what to do, when values much higher and not only for phospates. Did anyone used decent under sink water filters(similar to it)? I'm wondering, would it solve the situation or not

Cheers!

[Snails for my cycling planted tank]

On 12/23/2020 at 12:30 PM, Jess said:

My 17-gallon tank has been running for 3 weeks.  It's full of plants - some melting, some kinda chillin', and some taking off.  More details and tank parameters at the end for those interested.

I'm so grateful to see some baby snails that hatched in the tank (first saw 2 as teeny-tiny specks on 12/14, and now they are a bit bigger and I see more).  I'm glad they are around to start cleaning up some of the dead and dying plant matter.  My question is this: I'd like to control this snail population naturally, and I don't plan to add snail-eating fish to this tank.  I know that if I can keep the food source limited, I have a good chance at limiting their population.  I don't really mind them...they are helping me now.  What I don't want to happen is their population explodes because of all the plant matter available now, and then once the tank stabilizes, the plants take off, and I add fish in a couple of months, the snails start dying off and causing problems when I can't find their little dead bodies in and amongst the plants!  So, I'm considering adding one or two nerite snails.  They are larger, so they'll eat more and if they die I stand a better chance of finding them.  My thought is they'd help "absorb" the excess plant matter and thus control the pond snail population to a reasonable level.  I can't easily use my pond vacuum or snip the dead matter because it causes the plants to uproot from the soil, and I'm giving them a chance to melt and come back.

Any thoughts from the crowd?  Is this a good idea?  Do you have a better suggestion?  Am I worrying about this too much?  (Also, comments on the timing...should I wait until the nitrites are 0 or will that give the snails too much of an edge, LOL?)

Thanks, everyone!

 

More tank details:  It's got ADA aquasoil (wanted to try something different) and pressurized CO2 (about 1 bps).  It's consistently running at pH 6.4, KH and GH 2 degrees, and total ammonia 1-2ppm.  Nitrites 0ppm until two days ago, when they started spiking to 3 ppm.  Nitrates have been around 0-2.5ppm (probably from the rainwater; I use a combo of rainwater and tap), but now at 20ppm (they were 10ppm the day after I dosed Easy Green for the first time).  In this 3-week period I have added some FritzZyme 7, and I also left all the rock wool in from my various plant shipments over the past 3 weeks (I bought from 4 different sources, including Aquarium Coop). 

Hey, Jess! How did you decide it finally? I'm thinking about nerite snails too. I got 20 gallon tank(this) but I'm sure that size doesn't matter, does it?