About Me

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Hello. I have been keeping fish since mid year 2004. I have had a fully planted High Tech tank set up since the end of 2005. I have since expanded from a single 29g tank to: A High tech 60g, Low tech 29g, a ADA Mini M nano high tech. 2021 I purchased a small Mini All In One tank and a couple months later setup the Mini M with a Hi Tech setup.

Friday, June 22, 2007

29g From start to Now

I started this tank a few years back. I purchased the Petsmart 29g kit and It began from there.

Here are a few pictures tracing its history.:)

This is a couple months after I had started the tank. I didn't know that much about fish but I knew I liked the rope fish in that picture. They claimed it didn't eat fish but every once and a while a danio would go missing. Man thats almost criminal what I am doing to those fish in that tank...:)


This is a little less than a year later. I put anubias in there and had one 18w bulb for a 29g tank. :)


This is about one year later. I just started with plants. As you can see I used a rather unconventional material to tie the anubias to the rocks. Don't make fun of my nerdy pose. I was caught by surprise. I didn't know a couple years later I would be showing it on the Internet.




This is a picture just after receiving my plants from Aquariumplants.com. They came in pretty decent. I got hit by bad green water right away. You can already see it coming. I covered the tank, complete black out for 3 days. Threw some micros, and macros in there, got the DIY co2 cooking and It went away. First algae battle was a success. I only lost the Rotala macrandra v. narrow leaf. This was not a big surprise because it didn't look that great right out of the box.



This is a picture after winning the first algae battle. I lost a few plants and the water is still clearing up.




This next picture is my first attempt at an aquascape. This is before I had learned anything straight from my head, unhindered by the common aquascaping rules and conventions.... So don't go making fun of it.:) Thats glosso in the middle areas. It actually grew quite well for me. Unlike my recent attempts in my 60g.(Read last post)



I know this looks like I had found out about Iwagumi and the art of arranging three stones... Its not. I just had three rocks and I arranged them into a sort of mountain. It also is quite a bit out of the golden ratio. To far to the right. It also has no midground on the left side.



As you can see here I could tell something was missing so i started to try and create a midground. I really didn't know what I was doing I just went with what looked right... I grew the cabomba really dense on the left side and did a decent job hiding the reactor... Of course I never bothered to move the airline...



This is a couple months later I centered my mountain and made a rather symmetrical scape. I was just concentrating on growing the plants and despite only having DIY co2 it grew quite well. Didn't do a good job of hiding the co2 reactor though.


I finally started to learn a little and This tank was supposed to grow into a triangular scape with higher stems tapering to the right. It has a nice fielf of blyxa. I should have had a foreground space inbetween the glass and the blyxa, you live and you learn...


This is that same tank a couple weeks later when we returned from vacation. I had rigged up an airpump to pump fertilizers into the tank. It worked ok the only problem was I am pretty sure the tank lights never turned off. The timer I used was broken when I returned and I am not sure how long it had been like that. The water had fallen to where the end of the white water marks are in this picture. I am lucky I had a cannister filter that kept running. It kept my fish alive. Well most of them. All of that blyxa died. I haven't kept it since. I tried a few months later in my 60g but it melted.


This was my first scape when I got back to that disaster. This is a couple months after the rescape when i planted some extra Eleocharis parvula from my 60g scape. I ended up using most of it to plant the 60g because the HC I got was destroyed during shipping.





I changed it over time to this.


Then I had BGA problems... So I rescaped it again without stems. It didn't have many plants but I added some more right after this picture was taken.



Finally I got some Crypts from Mike (SCAPE president), some more anubias from Ron(SCAPE member), and I got some moss from Cassie(SCAPE officer). I got the Manzanita wood and a few plantlets of Narrow leaf Java fern from Ed (SCAPE Officer). So this tank is really a club effort. The regular java fern is the same plantlet that can be seen way back over a year ago. It just kept growing through all the turmoil. Same with the anubias. 3/4 of the anubias in the last picture cam from the two plants in my second picture.

3 comments:

mew said...

Wow, great record of the tank's history. Wish I did that for my old tanks. I may have to dig through my old photo albums and see if I have anything saved. :P

Really cool to see the progress!

Anonymous said...

I like this one! Very Nature!

Regards,

Joscape said...

Thanks for this! I have a similar sized tank and need some inspiration. I have never 'aquascaped' before. This tank is beautiful and I hope to try and create something similar.....