Well, I got a good chance to do some work today after church. My wife (pregnant with our 2nd child) took about a four hour nap with our 20 month old daughter! It was perfect timing!!
I started by draining the water from the 29g. It was a nasty task. Once the water was out, I scooped as much of the MTS and capping material out as I could by hand. After that, it was outside to the backyard and a water-hose to finish off the failed MTS project.
In the process, I discovered that the "manzanita" that I purchased is quite decayed. Pretty much every bit of it was sort of spongy...if that makes any sense to you. That being said, it wasn't rotten to the point of falling apart. In fact, this may be a typical stage in the life of manzi in the aquarium. Oh well, it's back in the tank and looks fine.
After I got it cleaned out to my liking, I got it back inside, hooked the plumbing back up, then began the task of arranging my hardscape. As you can see in the following picture, I decided to create a manzi structure on the middle-right of the tank. This is where my anubias and moss will call home. To the left of the tank, I created a tiered look using petrified wood. The EC is about 1-2" deep on the near side of the petrified wood and about 3-4" deep behind the petrified wood. This gives me the ability to keep plants out of each other's areas more effectively and provides nice depth to the tank.
FTS (12/2/12 about 10 minutes after it was filled):
Obviously, I am in need of plants in a bad way. I posted a WTB in the SNS earlier today. It's been a while since I was a regular on TPT, and the SNS has certainly changed over the past couple of years. I've had some good contact via my WTB, and I'm hoping to have some of the plants that I'm after in this tank within a couple weeks.
The anubias, as you can tell from the previous picture, are ready to rock-n-roll. I was shocked at how healthy they each looked after almost a year in what amounts to aquatic hell. I'm pretty confident that I can't kill anubias!
I had initially purchased one large needle java fern when I first established my MTS attempt. That one fern produced five very healthy babies that had 4-5 leaves each. I took all of the fern that was healthy looking and tied it to a rock. This is an idea that I picked up off another TPT'er recently. It should make it easier to make changes in the future. All I have to do is move the rock to make an immediate change in the tank.
Here's what I made using my java ferns:
Here's how it is going to sit in the tank...
....and here it is inside the tank:
And to finish off the post, here's a shot of the tank as it sits right now:
I'm going to eventually move the fava fern rock to the far right-rear corner to help hide the xp1's intake. I like the way it looks like one solid fern with multiple leaves. Hopefully it will continue to grow and eventually look even nicer than it does today!
I'm going to make a trip to a welding supply shop here in Alvarado tomorrow afternoon so I can get my pressurized CO2 up and running again. Anybody have any idea how long CO2 resistant line lasts? Mine is over two years old now (With less than one year of actual use under its belt).
I have a package on its way to my house this week. I'm going to position the koralia nano to flow opposite the flow of my xp1's outflow spray bar. Hopefully this and the CO2 will help me combat algae in this setup.
The water is quite murky at the moment, but I'm sure it'll be cleared up by this time tomorrow.
Thanks for reading my novel! Comments are enjoyed!!
Charlie