Hello and thanks for reading my thread!
I've been a long time lurker of UKAPS,TPT and BR and have now been keeping fish for close to 2 years. I've been keeping planted tanks for the past 1.5 and this is my first attempt at a truly aquascaped setup.
In this tank I've tried, where I can, to stick to concepts such as negative space, rule of thirds and golden ratio - though I doubt I've fulfilled them as best I could!
After reading several threads on the Dry Start Method and so many success stories, I wanted to try this out for myself.
There's been a number of sources for inspiration here but my visit to Leicester's Maidenhead Aquatics to see a talk by George Farmer on Aquascaping fuelled me to do this. It also helped that it's what I'd wanted to do for some time but lacked the confidence and knowledge to do so!
In this tank, I'll try and make a pathway along with using the Dry start method with mosses such as Fissidens Fontanus, Riccadia and Riccia.
So without further ado, the tank.
This is what I started off with :
This was obviously cleaned as best it could to :
There was LOADS of muck!
We'd come up with a bit of a plan on what we wanted to do. We've wavered a little but I think it's possibly for the best.
The wood piece we'd decided on was chopped and glued from about 4 different pieces:
We came up with a few layouts using our own tree root, along with ADA aquasoil. We've found this to work really well in the Discus tank so far from knocking it we decided to use it again.
Layout 1 :
Layout 2: (I love lidless!)
Layout 3 : Courtesy of the missus!
Layout 4 : this felt a bit more natural but also felt the right hand side was lacking something
As you can tell we're pretty set on the "tree" being on the Left of the tank. On the right of the tank, we're hoping the inlet and outlet pipes will be well hidden and a lilypipe will be placed on order soon.
Since we think we had a winner, some supports were made (inspired by The Green Machine, but just not as expensive!)
Cheapo corrugated plastic :
My own branded "MedicMan Substrate supports" :
This is pretty much as far as we got tonight (01/07/15) We're thinking the heater may be put behind the tree/hill and thus covered up.
So I head out looking for something to add to the right hand side of the tank.
Layout 5 : Something didn't feel quite right. My eyes were hunting for a focal point and were almost torn between top left and centre.
48a30e4c7d0bb3c2df93685dacedf0e7[1] by Abdul, on Flickr
Layout 6 : I moved the path slightly off centre and cut the root I bought, trying to lead the eyes to the bottom right corner. I'm quite happy with this and decided to start planting. (Mrs. Medic wouldn't have let me carry on with this tank without an "archway"!
Prepping the HC
So many HC plugs!
Very little HC went to waste. These strands were planted as seen in a propagator thread in another forum
The tank now :
2199b2f06390acf5e9ab583b57bb4d71[1] by Abdul, on Flickr
So I've saturated the Aquasoil with RO water, mixed with about 5ml of EI ferts (calculated from my previous EI mix for a 150L tank). The water line is barely visible and the substrate appears dark black rather than the dry grey colour.
Luckily due to the current heat, the tank is staying at a toasty 28C with what seems a good humidity. I've yet to determine what the true humidity is.
I'm misting the tank 1x a day at present with an EI/RO mix - again, 5ml in about 2L of water - so fairly dilute. The lights are on for about 10Hrs and 100% covered with clingfilm.
It's only been two days with the substrate saturated so I'm not quite sure what to expect the next few days.
Any tips and advice are very very welcome!
I've been a long time lurker of UKAPS,TPT and BR and have now been keeping fish for close to 2 years. I've been keeping planted tanks for the past 1.5 and this is my first attempt at a truly aquascaped setup.
In this tank I've tried, where I can, to stick to concepts such as negative space, rule of thirds and golden ratio - though I doubt I've fulfilled them as best I could!
After reading several threads on the Dry Start Method and so many success stories, I wanted to try this out for myself.
There's been a number of sources for inspiration here but my visit to Leicester's Maidenhead Aquatics to see a talk by George Farmer on Aquascaping fuelled me to do this. It also helped that it's what I'd wanted to do for some time but lacked the confidence and knowledge to do so!
In this tank, I'll try and make a pathway along with using the Dry start method with mosses such as Fissidens Fontanus, Riccadia and Riccia.
So without further ado, the tank.
This is what I started off with :
This was obviously cleaned as best it could to :
There was LOADS of muck!
We'd come up with a bit of a plan on what we wanted to do. We've wavered a little but I think it's possibly for the best.
The wood piece we'd decided on was chopped and glued from about 4 different pieces:
We came up with a few layouts using our own tree root, along with ADA aquasoil. We've found this to work really well in the Discus tank so far from knocking it we decided to use it again.
Layout 1 :
Layout 2: (I love lidless!)
Layout 3 : Courtesy of the missus!
Layout 4 : this felt a bit more natural but also felt the right hand side was lacking something
As you can tell we're pretty set on the "tree" being on the Left of the tank. On the right of the tank, we're hoping the inlet and outlet pipes will be well hidden and a lilypipe will be placed on order soon.
Since we think we had a winner, some supports were made (inspired by The Green Machine, but just not as expensive!)
Cheapo corrugated plastic :
My own branded "MedicMan Substrate supports" :
This is pretty much as far as we got tonight (01/07/15) We're thinking the heater may be put behind the tree/hill and thus covered up.
So I head out looking for something to add to the right hand side of the tank.
Layout 5 : Something didn't feel quite right. My eyes were hunting for a focal point and were almost torn between top left and centre.
48a30e4c7d0bb3c2df93685dacedf0e7[1] by Abdul, on FlickrLayout 6 : I moved the path slightly off centre and cut the root I bought, trying to lead the eyes to the bottom right corner. I'm quite happy with this and decided to start planting. (Mrs. Medic wouldn't have let me carry on with this tank without an "archway"!
Prepping the HC
So many HC plugs!
Very little HC went to waste. These strands were planted as seen in a propagator thread in another forum
The tank now :
So I've saturated the Aquasoil with RO water, mixed with about 5ml of EI ferts (calculated from my previous EI mix for a 150L tank). The water line is barely visible and the substrate appears dark black rather than the dry grey colour.
Luckily due to the current heat, the tank is staying at a toasty 28C with what seems a good humidity. I've yet to determine what the true humidity is.
I'm misting the tank 1x a day at present with an EI/RO mix - again, 5ml in about 2L of water - so fairly dilute. The lights are on for about 10Hrs and 100% covered with clingfilm.
It's only been two days with the substrate saturated so I'm not quite sure what to expect the next few days.
Any tips and advice are very very welcome!