Ishar's 20GH Planted tank

[ishar]

nope/ I just sliced it and tied it to a rock .

[ishar]

Well I went to the fish store today to pick up some potassium fertilizer for my tank. I ended up picking up both potassium and phosphorus, so now I have all of the macro nutrients to dose with. For the first week or so I will be dosing 1mL every other day of P, 1mL per day of flourish & K, and 2mL of N, and I will adjust these values depending on what I see at the end of each week. I also picked up an otto. I say them- small, young, and only $2. Hopefully this guys makes it through and survives, as I have heard they can have a hard time adjusting to new tanks, but I will drip acclimate him quite gradually then let him loose. There is a lot of algae for him to eat so I don't think that will be a problem :P.

[ishar]

Well the day has come .

I have come to the point that I feel my tank is overcrowded with little guppies. MissFishy warned me a long time ago that guppies would overrun my tank and I think they finally have. I have no friends to give them away to, but luckily my LFS will take them- for free, but at least I don't have to euthanize the adults. Many people are going to disagree with my choice here, and I am fine with that.

I am giving away my three adult females and two of the biggest of the fry of the female persuasion. The rest of the female fry I see (there are a few that I can 100% tell they are not males) are going to be given the ice water treatment- a very quick and hopefully relatively painless death. I do this because of several reasons, none of which are for aesthetics. The main reason is I have noticed that the growing fry are growing slower and slower- the size my first few fry achieved in a month is now taking almost 2 for new fry. Also I believe my neons to be stressing out, as they tend to hide more and more as the days go on and there colours are generally faded out. The colours fade out most when the guppies come out of hiding during feeding and when the cover is of of the tank. The tank is just pure chaos of activity.

So I am going to get rid of the females before I have any more fry. I am deeply grieved by this decision, but having thought about it for a long time I have made my own decision, so please don't try to convince me otherwise. I didn't post my thoughts on it here previously so I could decide for myself what is the right thing to do.

On another note, I will hopefully be bringing home a pot of java fern- the normal kind. I will be mixing it in with the Winelov variety on the big piece of driftwood, and hopefully my camera will cooperate for some pics.

[ishar]

Well I sent my adult females off and added some Microsorium pteropus (Java fern). I have not done any euthanizing yet, and may not for a while yet- we'll see. They took some of the smaller females so if I wait a few months I may be able to do it again. Anyways here are some more crappy laptop pics. I mixed this fern in with the Windelov version, and I rearranged the glosso and grass a bit- I let the grass go behind the small piece of wood and removed what glosso was there except for some I replanted in front of the little piece.

I also trimmed a lot of the brown dead leaves from my windelov after the algae attacked. It looks much better now- and it is amazing how thick it had grown! What looked like three or four stems was just one with a lot of tips splitting off at the end!

Now that I have done all of this my left side seems very much empty. I was hoping my anubias would grow a little faster and I am going to fill that piece of wood up with anubias, but I may have to rethink that plan. Any ideas for the LHS would be dandy and appreciated.

[ishar]

I forgot to add that my green fuzzy algae has been coming back. I had it receding and fading out, and the otto I bought has done wonders with the BBA, but I believe in dosing 1mL/day of phosphorous I overdosed and algae broke out. I cut this amount back to 0.5mL/day, but I dose it at one milliliter every other day.

I am still very open to suggestions about the left hand side

EDIT: Now I think I am going to cut the P dosing to .25mL/day, as I dosed 1mL today and then realized that my algae is still around.

[ishar]

Well today I took my big chunk of windelov as well as one of the others and broke them up into a bunch of small pieces- some don't have leaves, some have no roots, some have neither, but they are all tied on on both pieces of wood- hopefully that will help my left side out a bit. This meant I had to remove the big mat of java moss on the small wood, but that is fine with me. I kept the other two still. I am getting sick of these crappy laptop pics, but here are a few just so you can see what I mean.

[Adorkable]

Awesome tank Kyle! I would buy yours off of you, mine looks like ****
Haha

[ishar]

Thanks dorky . Maybe in a few months I will have a bunch of trimmings to sell, and maybe this time you could grab some :P.

[Adorkable]

Hehe, YAY trimmings! Lmao
Every one calls me dorky now, I LOVE IT!!
XD

[pwrmacG4]

tank looks great! nice aquascaping!