Jim

OK, some of you know I have Angelfish babies that I just seperated from my big tank. Part of this is because I needed to rebuild my big tank; a 46 gallon bowfront. I had a nice tank, and a few live plants that were doing OK, but some others were dying, and beginning to rot. I wanted to wait, and custom order exactly the right plants, but when my ph started to spike and I was reading ammonia, I realized I didn't have time to get picky.

So, I shopped around and found out what I had locally, gathered up everything I needed, and spent the weekend redoing my tank. I bought 4 new Home Depot 5 gallon buckets, both to put my fish in and to keep as much of the original tank water as posssible. I also saved some of the original tank gravel and mixed this with the first layer of Eco-Complete for a bottom layer, and to try and avoid any cycling problems. In total I have a bottom layer of aprox. 20 pounds of river gravel mixed with 50 ounces of Laterite and a 20 pound bag of Eco-Complete. Over this is 60 more pounds of Eco-Complete, mixed witha a little of the remaining river gravel, giving me a nice 3" layer in the front and enough to fill in behind the rock wall.

The plants are:
In the front: on the outsides are Cryptocoryne Lucens and on the insides are Narrow Leaf Chain Swords. These should spread and mingle to cover the front floor of the tank. I was overjoyed to find the chain swords, because if you look closely at the pictures, you'll see little weird stalks coming out if them. These are actually buds of little white flowers, and the only little foreground sword plant I know of that does this.
On the tree stump, and on the left peice of driftwood, are Java ferns. I will also add Java moss and/or congo ferns to the driftwood if I can find them.
Behind the rock wall are 4 Amazon Swords flanked by 2 Radican Swords. And between them are plugs of dwarf hairgrass. Ideally the hairgrass will spread and fill in around the swords, but I'm a bit concerned I may not have enough light for hairgrass to grow and spread properly. If if doesn't do well I'll swap it with microsword.

Anyway, that's it. Nothing too fancy, but still twice as pretty as before. It was the best I could do with what I had to work with.
I'll take more pics in a few weeks when it has a chance to grow and fill out some.

Attached Images

	Tank.jpg (301.1 KB, 73 views)
	RightSide.jpg (417.0 KB, 33 views)
	Java.jpg (398.6 KB, 17 views)
	Hairgrass.jpg (279.8 KB, 21 views)

atmmachine816

OO purty, very nice. Should look good after it fills out. Ya I would be concerned about your hairgrass, may not survive or if it does may have to keep giving it haircuts to keep it looking nice. But hey, you could make some funny looking dudes out of it

Jim

Actually, I don't think it gets much longer than it is already. I have a book:
Aquarium Plant Paradise by Takashi Amano
and it has some of the most incredable garden tanks in it, and how they're set up.
One of this guys favorite things to do is make huge valleys of this same hairgrass in the foreground of several of these tanks. It's beautiful, and doesn't look cut or anything.

atmmachine816

hmm ok, would be cool if you could do that.

Jim

Check out this post, it has a link to tanks like what I'm discribing... they are unreal. Eventually it's what I want to build.

These are AMAZING!

atmmachine816

Yes amazing tanks, that would be cool to see yours develop into something like that. I have to wait till I"m done with school to try something like that unfortunately, I'll just have to watch you.

Jim

This time I tried to plan this to grow and fill out. I don't know how long it will take to fill out, but there's no hurry... it depends on the lighting, substrate, plants in general...
It'll be fun to see how it goes

Isabella

Hey Jim, it looks GREAT ! I love Crypts Lucens and Amazon Swords Have no experience with Pygmy Chain / Narrow Leaf Chain Swords but I always wanted to buy them. Probably will. I've heard on Plant Geek that they may be a little difficult to grow in low-light/low-tech tanks, so I would be interested in your feedback about how they grow in your tank. What is your lighting level (wpg) and what Kelvin temperature (K) of your lightbulbs? Do you plan on using CO2? As for the substrate, looks like a rich mixture - and that, I think, is very good to have

jack11

congratualtions your tank is absolutely stunning!

Peterpiper

Look FANTASTIC.. You have a good eye for this hey

atmmachine816

I'm still waiting for my tank to grow out, low light takes a long time, but don't you have t-5 lighting, so it should be better?

COBettaCouple

looks great! i love the 'ledge' effect.

Jim

Thanks guys... I was down in Tampa today, and came across a store with a bunch more hairgrass and 4 more chain-swords, so I was able to fill out both the front and back some. I also realized that the weird flower thing in the picture (of the chain sword) is a runner, and needs to be on the ground. The flowers will still shoot up, but at the base it will become another chain-sword... pretty cool.

Isabella and atmmachine:
Yes, I have T5 lights; 2 identical 36" sets. Both have one 21watt Full Color Spectrum tube and one 21 watt 6700K plant light tube.
I also have a smaller coralife blue-white light with 2 mini-compact flourescent lights: a 9watt 10,000K and a 9 watt ACT blue (technically this is for saltwater tanks, but it makes for a nice dawn-dusk effect, so I haven't switched it out yet).
These are all set to seperate overlapping timers. It starts at 6:00 am with the 20 watt, one of the T5's at 7:00 am, both T5's at 10:00 am, all 3 lights at noon, then back down to both T5's at 2:00 pm, one T5 at 4:00 pm, the 20watt at 7:00 PM, and finally off for the night at 9:00 pm. The idea is to simulate a day cycle as best as possible, without killing my electric bill. The problem is it's hard to figure out what the WPG is because it depends on what time of day it is and how many lights are on at the time.
This turned out so far to be an awesome setup, and while the plants seem to be doing good, the algea isn't bad, and the pleco and oto's are keeping it in check. Unless I really need to, I don't want to upgrade.
As for the C02 bubbler, I don't have one yet. I don't want to if I don't have to, but in my searching for plants, I found a LFS that has them, if I need one.

What else?? Oh yeah, COBettaCouple, I was actually looking for a big peace of slate at one of my favorite LFS's to replace the one on the stump when I came across a big pile of the very narrow pieces you see. I'm originally from upstate NY, and when I was a kid we would come across some old stone wall on a farm all the time. I always loved them, so when I found these rocks it was the first thing that popped in my head. It was funny, because I sat there buildng a little stone wall on the floor of the store to see if I could get enough and the owner walked by and never said a word other than Hi.. Turns out there were enough..

lyndatu

Your tank is absolutely amazing! That's the theme I'm looking for! The natural theme! Why can't I create an aquascape as beautiful as yours? Please share me your secrets! What's the gravel you used? What are those logs: Artificial or Natural? You got so many plants! The shops around me don't have any! I know! I'm going to post a thread for topics! Yes, yes........hehehe............ I need a natural aquarium theme that is as good as yours!

Anyways, great tank!

Isabella

Jim, I'm getting a bit confused with your lighting. How many wpg's exactly do you have?

bhcaaron

drool! Me loves pictures! hahahaha

Love the look!

Jim

OK, I figured out the WPG's but it depends on what time it is:

6:00am-7:00am 0.4wpg
7:00am-10:00am 0.9wpg
10:00am-12:00pm 1.8wpg
12:00pm-2:00pm 2.2wpg
2:00pm-4:00pm 1.8wpg
4:00pm-7:00pm 0.9wpg
7:00pm-9:00pm 0.4wpg

So as you can see, as the day goes on the wpgs increase; until around noon, then decrease again. But simply put, with all 3 lights running, I get 2.2 wpg's.

bhcaaron

Wow! Go Jim!