Colorado - 140Ltr Opti-White

Beautiful tank indeed.
 
Absolutely love the light setup, excellent job
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A tank of the month entry if i ever saw one
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Ch4rlie said:
Beautiful tank indeed.
 
Absolutely love the light setup, excellent job
yes.gif

 
A tank of the month entry if i ever saw one
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Many thanks ;)  Jumping the gun a bit on tank of the month.  It's not grown in yet :)
 
Hi Supercoley
 
Great journal and fantastic tank! I was wondering if you have any tips on keeping S repens? I have kept much more "demanding" plants with better success than I have Staurogyne. I've  purchased it at least twice before (pot and 1-2grow) and for a while it does ok and then just melts?
 
Thanks for the compliment.
 
r.e. Staurogyne Repens.  This is the first time I have used it but apart from some browning during the 9 week (oops lazy me) dry start it has flourished.  I have hacked it back down at the moment just as I did with the Ranunculus and Hydrocotyle.  They got quite leggy during the transition during the first week or 2 following flooding of the tank and I wanted them to be more compact.
 
I can't really answer your problem as I haven't encountered it.........Is it just the S Repens or does any other plant show any problem around the same time?
 
Beautiful tank, Coley!
 
Primous - I too have never had the success I would like with Staurogyne!  Now I simply grow it in a propagator where it will flourish in wet soil and sunlight.  When big enough I transfer it to the tank and if/when it starts to look leggy I snip the stems off and lay them on their side on top of the soil in the propagator, each old leaf nodule will then make new roots and plantlets to grow in the air.
 
SuperColey1 said:
Thanks for the compliment.
 
r.e. Staurogyne Repens.  This is the first time I have used it but apart from some browning during the 9 week (oops lazy me) dry start it has flourished.  I have hacked it back down at the moment just as I did with the Ranunculus and Hydrocotyle.  They got quite leggy during the transition during the first week or 2 following flooding of the tank and I wanted them to be more compact.
 
I can't really answer your problem as I haven't encountered it.........Is it just the S Repens or does any other plant show any problem around the same time?
 
It's a weird melt in that it starts with just one plant and then moves to another which is is close by. Melting plant by plant instead of on mass. But I have come to accept it lol
 
Stunning tank. Your carpet plant is covering nicely. I have been waiting for mine to cover like that for weeks now
 
I virtually covered it from the start in reality.  I used a lot of Monte Carlo there that I bought from someone.  Was probably the equivalent of 10 pots worth :)
 
How time flies. It is nearly 3 months since this aquascape was flooded. Just a few cheeky pictures here. This is just after I have heavily pruned the Rotala sp Green and Hemmianthus Micranthemoides.
 
A few changes since the last update. The Proserpinaca Palustris was growing so slowly that I took it out and put it in another tank. I replaced it with some Rotala Rotundifolia which I had on hand.
 
It may mess up the look of the aquascape in the end because everything else in this aquascape is green whereas the Rotundifolia will give off a yellow to Peach to pink section to the rear right. It also has to resurrect itself from the brink too as it has spent the winter virtually continuously encased in ice in a bucket outside.
 
When I brought it in from the cold in early February it was so weak it was falling to pieces in my hands but it is now starting to show some green shoots of recovery.
 
With the Greyhound moved out of the way while I worked on the aquascape my 3 year old daughter took the opportunity to get fingerprints all over the glass.
 
Livestock added so far are 20 Blue Jelly Shrimp and 6 normal Otocinclus. The Blue Jelly shrimp have already have fry and there are little darts flying around the tank. They aren't blue though. At this stage they are a translucent reddish hue.
 
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Yes... So beautiful! I love to see your updates on this!
 
All of the updates so far have been pictures taken after a pruning and I was asked to take some pictures before pruning showing the Rotala at the back. Not one for being bashful I took the pictures the very next day (10th April.) Not one for being very motivated it has taken me 6 weeks to publish them but here they are anyway.
 
You'll be glad to know that I will stop including the 'dog in picture' photos. Risking my own life I have been shifting him from his 23 hour a day slumber pad while working on the aquascape.
 
The aquascape is still in quite a young state here and not filled in as much as you will see in the next update. You can also see some symptoms of my laziness in terms of maintenance. I have left this scape sometimes for 3 or 4 weeks at a time without water changes. I have been lazy with the dosing too, sometimes not dosing at all for a week and the result has been some BBA directly opposite the filter outflow.
 
If you have sharp eyes you may also notice the middle row of the LEDs have been turned off. It was growing way too fast for me and that kind of growth is just a disaster waiting to happen when the aquascaper is as lazy as me. Those with sharp eyes may also notice that I have now routed an acrylic split lid.
 
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And to bring us right up to date:
 
This aquascape is now starting to fill out really well. The Hydrocotyle is a pain to keep stuffing down as it really is a weed. The HM also grows really fast too.
The Narrow Fern is now starting to push on and has gone from being quite thin to getting bushy around where it had been attached and now is starting to creep further along the branches. It normally happens this way for me. I attach it thinly and it takes a while for it to attach itself properly and settle in before it then speeds away.
 
Hopefully it will get somewhere close to where I want it to be in the next month or 2 at which point I plan to turn the CO2 off (if it hasn't run out) and then leave it under 1 row of LEDs as a 'permanent' aquascape. I'm not one for ripping aquascapes down and moving on to the next one like many aquascapers. I tend to aim for something I want to keep for a decent length of time and only pull them down when they aren't reaching the vision I had or once I feel like a change.
 
There are a couple of pictures here of the Blue Jelly shrimp. These are of course the European version of blue jelly the Davidii / Heteropoda. I bought 20 initially and as you can see they have reproduced like mad. The annoying thing though is that you may notice the majority of offspring don't come out purely blue. They are still blue but with red patches of varying degrees.
 
Not sure if I got a bad line or if they normally don't breed true but it will mean I have to separate 'true blues' into a breeding tank if I want to sell them on.
 
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