72 Dirted Planted Project

[HybridHerp]

The DHG is probably turning yellow due to not enough light.
TO be honest, Im not sure if t12 bulbs have enough of a PAR reading at the substrate to make it effective. Someone call Hoppy into this thread lol.
Otherwise, I love everything :P

[ccbeauch]

LMFAO! That picture of the cat and fish is awesome!

I just put the discus in the tank today! The plants are all doing great and the DHG has started to root and is super green. I cut the Foxtail in half and replanted. They are consistantly about 2 inches in diameter and were the fastest to reach the top of the tank. The rotala wallichii has started to grow upwards in the last few days because I added some iron tablets. prior to that there was little growth at all but nothing was dying.

The discus are coming out and look very happy with their new tank. They do however look very small which made me laugh because they looked so large in the 29 gallon tank. I also used my last test strip yesterday so now I'm just going to have to be consistant on the water changes and hope everything goes well. I will add some pictures next time I stop by because right now the suns up and half of the tank is just one big reflection.

[ccbeauch]

closed the curtains and took a ton of pictures. here are some of the better ones that I liked. I think the light was the issue with the DHG so when i got 4 bulbs it really turned it around and saved them

[ccbeauch]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GPLS...ature=youtu.be

Made this video a while ago and just figured I'd let everyone know what a "fake" planted tank looks like. That one is gone now and the new one has never been better.

[ccbeauch]

So this week i saw some major growth to my plants. I have been dosing with excel 3 times this week and am going to start doing it on a regular basis. I wanted to make sure the discus would be fine and that the plants were benefitting from it. Seems like they have if you compare last weeks photos to this weeks worth of growth. I also cut the fox tail in half for the second time and the rotala in half for the first time and replanted all of the stems. I am going for the bushy look and want a large background of plant. The rotala wallichii has started to grow for the first time noticably. Not sure if it is from the iron pellets or the excel but I'm hoping a bit of both.

The dwarf hair grass has also started to root out which I am super excited about after its near death look two weeks ago. The only problem now is that the discus like to rip them up when some food goes near it. The blue diamond ripped a huge peice out just to spite me I think.

Still no real sign of alge unless that brown stuff on the foxtail is a brown alge. I was thinking its just dirt dust because I managed to stir it up every time I mess with the tank and it makes the tank cloudy.

Enjoy

[ccbeauch]

Has anyone ever tried adding feeder fish to a discus tank to see if they would eat them to test if adding cardinals would be okay? Kinda on a budget and don't want to see loads of cardinals become an expensive meal.

[ccbeauch]

Well my tank has survived all the way to 6 weeks and is thriving! It's still not perfect the way I want it but the tank is starting to settle and is starting to look really nice in my opinion.

I was looking at the past two years and how aweful of aquascapes I used to have and how much I just loved them back then and still today even though they are gone. The angelfish that paired and had eggs are the reason why I have progressed and fell in love with fish keeping. Most of the pictures I added are of fish that are gone now other than the first week discus pictures I took when they were young little babies. That ghost knife is still alive and HUGE now in my dads 90 gallon tank back at home. It's been great so far and looking forward to advancing my aquascaping skills as this keeps on going.

Two of those discus are still with me, Blue diamond and Marlboro Red. The Scribble jumped out one night and was dead on the floor when I woke up and the pidgeon blood (my favorite) wasn't eating because he was the runt and I took him back before he died too. Have fun looking at my past tanks

[ccbeauch]

They only allow 15 pics to be added at a time and there were 3 more I wanted to add. Here they are. the discus that looked sick in the top picture was VERY sick and so were the rest of them at the time. I did a lot of changing to their tank at the time and it was just too much. Plus a LFS that I went to was very dirty and against my better judgment I got the two discus with the stripes. Then the discus rubbed on that lava rock when they had diseases and that cut them open like a hot knife through butter. I also found out later that it may have affected my pH level which could have added to the stress at the time. I have no idea how I saved them because two were belly up and I almost quit fish keeping but then they all came back to life and are now healthier than ever! I guess sometimes the fish keeping gods smile upon us

[ccbeauch]

This was a sad week for my aquarium. I had a fish die on me this week. All was fine when I left in the morning, but when I came back I noticed something was sideways and stuck in the plants. It was my smallest discus!? not too sure how he died but his stomach area was the size of a large marble. It wasn't like that when I left so my best guess was that he was shooting across the tank and when he smacked into the wall, his swim bladder exploded. After dealing with that on Thursday night, I then did a large water change Friday and this is what it looks like now.

I think possibly next week I might buy a Parrotblood Red and something else from a LFS where my parents live, because they get the Stendecker kind that do very well at a reasonable price. That is the same store that the Blue diamond came from. Anyway, enjoy week 7 photos and updates.

[245Bettalover]

wow nice tank

[ccbeauch]

Originally Posted by 245Bettalover

wow nice tank

Thanks a lot! It has been fun so far and I'm glad others appreciate what I've been doing as well. I was unsure if anyone else even looked at this, because I hadn't gotten any replies in a few weeks.

[ccbeauch]

So I know it's been a while since my last posting but due to a lack of replies I decided to take some weeks off of uploading photos. A lot has changed in the last 3 weeks of tank operation. There have been many additions to the tank and a few things have been taken away. First, for the additions to the aquarium:
6 new fish have been added to the tank. I bought two of my favorite discus (pigeon blood red) from a fish store that imports Hans-Stendker Discus from Germany. It is the same place I bought my Blue Diamond from over a year ago. I tried to buy some cardinals from them but they said my discus might eat them and convinced me not to risk it. The following day I went to my local Petsmart to buy some frozen food and low and behold, they had cardinals on sale for 1$ each! I bought the remaining four that they had in stock and my discus could care less about them! I also added Purigen to my AC 110 filter and within 3 days the white bag turned a dark brown. So it must have been doing its job but now this weekend I will have to purge it of the dark color and give it another try in the tank.
After 3 months of a high electric bill, I decided to take out two of my t12s and see the kind of impact a reduction of light would have in my tank. It has been almost a week and my tank has seen some repercussions. All of my plants are still alive but the HG is starting to yellow along with the tips of the sword plants and the middle of the foxtails. I think I am going to put it back in and maybe cut the time that the light is on down by an hour or two. At the moment it is on for 10 hours a day and the total increase for the tank jump from my 29 to 72 seems to be about 50$.
As a side note, I turned down the heat in my tank from 86 degrees to about 83-84 to see what type of impact that would have. I’ve been doing a lot of research on a newfound website of mine, simply discus, and have been learning more to discus keeping. I just checked the water and am showing 0ppm for nitrate, 0ppm for nitrite, a water hardness of 120ppm, alkalinity of 120ppm and a ph of 7.6-8.0 (which is the limit for discus). I think the ph is higher due to the type of wood in the tank. My old tank the ph used to sit at 6.4 to 6.6 so it is quite the swing of what I was used to seeing. I cleaned my petsmart CO2 producer and hid it behind the foxtail. I also have noticed that my albino bristle nose pleco (girl) hasn’t been eating the wafer I put in daily but the bristle nose pleco (boy) seems to chow down along with the discus on it. They almost fight over who gets to eat it. I was worried about her because her belly looks a little concave instead of fat like she had been eating. I was wondering if there was any other type of food I could try adding since the tablet seems a bit messy anyway to the water quality. The wafer is by tetra and is called tetra veggie algae wafer extreme with a concentrated algae center. It says on the back it does not cloud water but it does leave little particles floating all over the tank that the cardinals seem to eat as they swim.
Thanks for stopping by and happy picture gazing!

[ccbeauch]

Went back to Petsmart yesterday to see if they still had their sale going on (new fish come in on Fridays), and they did! So i bought out the rest of the 18 Cardinals they just recieved and walked away a happy man 22 total cardinals for 22, what a sale. Doing the math it should have cost over 100$ for all of them. Got to love that once a year great sale they have. Also noticed that they are selling dwarf hairgrass now and other plants worth talking about. More expensive than online but still they are moving in the right direction. Now they just nead a BA show tank to get the average fish person hooked.

[Turtlemaxxx]

Very nice sir. I too, just started the dirty tank thing. I also started a journal, and, like you, am worried that no one looks at it but me. Consider me subscribed.

[ccbeauch]

Originally Posted by Turtlemaxxx

Very nice sir. I too, just started the dirty tank thing. I also started a journal, and, like you, am worried that no one looks at it but me. Consider me subscribed.

Thanks for subscribing!

Did a water change last night and took a couple of pictures. This was one of my favorites Sorry I forgot to wipe my tank down before talking pictures... rookie mistake.