30cm Journal

[test.tin]

Hello everyone! Recently decided to come back to freshwater after taking a 2ish year hiatus to try out saltwater. As much as I enjoyed corals and saltwater fishes, I definitely missed having a planted tank. Decided to pick up a 7 gallon, 11x11x11 tank to start my journey.

The hardscape is pretty simple, found a nice piece of wood and I broke it in half to get the shape I wanted.

One of my favorite aquatic plant is this hydrocotyle verticillata that I had turned into a desk plant. I made sure to have the substrate and roots submerged the entire time, just in case I ever wanted to do a planted tank again.

I gave the hydrocotyle a big trim and placed all the roots and cycled substrate on the bottom, covered with new substrate to hopefully speed up the cycling process. As you can see, a little hydrocotyle poked out already. Pretty excited since it's only been a week with water filled in. I'm still on the planning phase for what other plants I want. The round rocks are just there to hold the wood down, will remove them eventually.

For stocking, I'm pretty excited to be able to put crystal red shrimps in the future. I've always wanted/loved them but have never gotten them due to having hard tap water. But thanks to trying out saltwater, I invested in a nice RODI system. Pretty excited to see how this tank differs due to using RO water compared to all my other previous tanks with hard tap water.
 

[TheSwissAquarist]

Have you thought of maybe attaching an Anubias onto the wood? Maybe with the tips of the leaves poking out of the surface? 

Hydrocotyle is all fine, but a shrimp hanging upside down from an Anubias leaf makes for a great photo! 
Nice scape btw🙂

[test.tin]

On 2/5/2023 at 10:05 PM, TheSwissAquarist said:

Have you thought of maybe attaching an Anubias onto the wood? Maybe with the tips of the leaves poking out of the surface? 

Hydrocotyle is all fine, but a shrimp hanging upside down from an Anubias leaf makes for a great photo! 
Nice scape btw🙂

Thank you for the great suggestion. I was planning to add anubias once the fungus clears off the wood, but didn't think about having it be higher to poke out of the surface.

[nabokovfan87]

On 2/5/2023 at 6:51 PM, test.tin said:

For stocking, I'm pretty excited to be able to put crystal red shrimps in the future. I've always wanted/loved them but have never gotten them due to having hard tap water. But thanks to trying out saltwater, I invested in a nice RODI system. Pretty excited to see how this tank differs due to using RO water compared to all my other previous tanks with hard tap water.

Looks like a really good setup for them. 🙂

I'm excited to see where you take things!