Suggestions on Change

[NewerFishPerson]

We have been working on getting a tank established over the last month. Today I changed it up a bit. I had all fake plants in the tank and I added in a nice piece of driftwood that I attached a java fern to. Thanks for the suggestion on a previous post I made. 🙂 We had all fake plants, and now with the java fern and driftwood, I want to go a more natural look.  I'm going to be setting up a future 20 gallon tank with all natural type stuff, but for now I'm just trying to work on some easy changes in my 10 gallon tank.  It's a month old tank still working through getting fully established.  We have added some hardy fish, and added the java to help everything along as well.  I would like to add more of a natural type cave in the background. Right now I have an octopus glo decoration and a barrel decoration. Had a few plastic plants, but we removed two of them today when adding the driftwood and java fern.  Really wanting to change up the blue gravel that is in the tank. Also looking for some suggestions on where to get a nice natural rock or driftwood type cave setup in place of the octopus.  Here an old pic of the tank just to show the size. I'll update soon with some newer photos of current layout. The octopus and barrels are in the same spot. 

[lefty o]

the co-op has little coconut caves.

[KaitieG]

I used one of the Co-ops coconut caves and glued java moss to it--it's really filled in and looks like a grassy mound.

[Jordan22]

I started with a 10 gallon tank and initially got gravel and all fake decor. I quickly realized I wanted plants though, and I wanted to use a good substrate (fluval or dirted) to give myself better odds of my plants thriving. Since my tank was already done though pulling out all the gravel would be a big task, so I actually planted my plants in terracotta pots (they cost less than a $1 at Home Depot). I find it hard to use the big tweezers for planting, this lets me do all the planting outside the tank and easily bury the roots. I can also easily turn the pots in the tank and move it around for trimming. And if I’m ever unsuccessful with a plant I can pull all the dead debris out. Also this way if I upgrade my tank I can easily move all my plants over. This might be obvious, but I didn’t know until I tried, if you do use dirt you have to add a layer of gravel (or something heavy) on top or the dirt will just float out. The terracotta pots don’t look natural, but I was focused more on getting some plants growing and seeing what would do well in my tank and what wouldn’t before spending the money and time on setting up driftwood. I love these though for how easy it makes adding plants to my tank, and how easy it makes gravel vacuuming with plants (I can just move them).