Substrates that you would NOT use.

[plantbrain]

[quote=mrparker;928534]How exactly do you go about baking 3" x 48" x 12" of sand? [quote]

Large aluminum foil baking pans for turkeys etc........cost a few $.
Sold at any grocer.

What is an easier or quicker way to get the boiling/baking task accomplished?

I am willing to drain the tank, remove the sand and sterilize it and put it back in. (should i mix it with larger gravel if i want to have a runner propagating foreground plant/grass?)

If it's already there.........I'd just leave it. Do a few water changes etc.
The idea is to oxidize it, speed the process up, reduce labor or wait time.

If you cannot cook/bake it in doors, then a boil it outside for 10 minutes.
You only cook the soil, not the sand also. So the volume is not that much.

Most BBQ's have the ability to cook a lot of soil.

But if not, then do the mineralization process over time(3 weeks typically is good) and shallow pan of water etc. Then you have live bacteria in there as well.

But few folks are willing to wait 3 weeks.........

This can also be done to ADA AS instead of changing the water lots for the first few weeks.

The worm castings + sand works well and you do not need that much either.
It was all the rage in our club some years ago.

Like many things, the trends come and go, but the methods/processes are similar, as well as trade offs.

At least today folks are less scared of the water column ferts and have stopped blaming it for everything. Some still do and some think soil cures all that. It doesn't. Not for DIY methods MS nor for ADA. Nor does it for water column ferts.

Growing plants is not all about nutrients.
Some seem to enjoy implying that.

Regards,
Tom Barr

[mrparker]

Originally Posted by plantbrain

If it's already there.........I'd just leave it. Do a few water changes etc.
The idea is to oxidize it, speed the process up, reduce labor or wait time.

If you cannot cook/bake it in doors, then a boil it outside for 10 minutes.
You only cook the soil, not the sand also. So the volume is not that much.

All I have in there is about 3 inches of sand. No soil, is that bad? I just read that with sand it will stink or create gas bubbles or something? thats why i was worried and thinking that i need to take it out and bake it or kill off the bad stuff in it

I am currently adding more of the same sand to my tank ( like any minute now ) that i washed earlier today. Do you recommend that I bake the new stuff just to be safe? It is going to be used to build up a better scaping design

And do I need to cook it for a period of time? at a certain temp? or till it is dry? or what?

Originally Posted by plantbrain

The worm castings + sand works well and you do not need that much either.

I dont know what this is

[Ariel301]

OK, I'll dissent.

I would not use any substrate that would cost me more that $5.00 unless there was a clear reason to do that

I'll dissent with you. I won't use the expensive store bought substrates. I'm a potting soil, kitty litter, and locally collected sand/small gravel kind of girl. It works fine for me, and I find the mess worth the savings. I paid about $10 for the substrate in my 55.

[mrparker]

my friend and i just spend a bit of time each day over the last week sifting gravel. Using a plastic craft canvas from walmart to sift out the bigger gravel, and then a screen stapled to a 1' by 1' 2x4 square to sift out the finer stuff, and now we have quite consistently sized gravel substrate, that has the ease of planting of sand, but wont compact. It was fun.

And it looks good, if you want to see a picture, i'll take one

[plantbrain]

Some like this type of DIY project.
Some do not.

If it's a time/labor issue or you are LFS without such time luxury, or you are trying to set up a tank for someone else on the clock $$, then the trade off is terrible. Better off working for min wage somewhere for the time vs saving benefit.

Seriously.

If you have no job/work, have free time, little $ etc, then......well...........now with nothing better to do vs taking what little $ you have, it starts to look pretty good.

I've likely processed 10000X more soil for use for aquatic plants than anyone on this entire list or forum ever has/will. It's far from "fun"
7 good sized truck loads worth just over the last 3 years alone.

Given my dithers, I'd pick ADA AS.


Worm castings protocol:
http://www.barrreport.com/co2-aquati...ments-how.html

Many very nice looking tanks appeared using this same method. No different in terms of results than ANY mineralized soil aquarium I've seen to date in the labor/dosing etc after either.

In other words, appears to be equal at the bare minimum.

Regards,
Tom Barr

[londonloco]

I'm a 52 year old woman, have a part time job, 2 kids still at home, 3 dogs, 2 cats. I also work with a rescue and foster puppy mill kids. Currently my foster is about to whelp a litter. I also am redoing my 120g and 75g. My household is beyond busy. I have a job, three of them in fact. And in my older age, I am blessed with enough $$ to have purchased substrate. I just finished mineralizing 120lbs of soil. It wasn't work at all. If you think mineralizing soil is work, come to my house, I'll show ya what work really is.

[plantbrain]

Originally Posted by londonloco

I'm a 52 year old woman, have a part time job, 2 kids still at home, 3 dogs, 2 cats. I also work with a rescue and foster puppy mill kids. Currently my foster is about to whelp a litter. I also am redoing my 120g and 75g. My household is beyond busy. I have a job, three of them in fact. And in my older age, I am blessed with enough $$ to have purchased substrate. I just finished mineralizing 120lbs of soil. It wasn't work at all. If you think mineralizing soil is work, come to my house, I'll show ya what work really is.

So how long did it take you to do and how much did you spend?

You might not even bother with the mineralizing part.
Just leave it in the tank for 3-4 weeks and add fish later.
ADA does that same approach with their ADA AS.
It's loaded with NH4 and organic matter like well, soil.
ADA tanks seem to do well.

The point is there are many trade offs, that includes many, many different ways to skin a cattail. Some might not consider it work, other seem to. Many different perceptions coming into this from many different folks about effort/work/DIY etc.

Glad you found it easy. Not everyone will share that view about it.
I've read plenty of folks who messed it up over the past decade+ I've been on line. They had nice how to instructions but for many reasons, they had issues. the worm castings worked pretty well, easy, faster than the MS method Sean suggested.

I like wetland sediment, some go to garden center, some do it in the tank, some do it prior, then add it later, some like brand name stuff etc etc. Some think it's more work than you perhaps. Some just do not like DIY methods.

I do not like two part substrates personally(sand cap + soil bottom).
Never have.

So I use ADA AS.

For research, I chose to use wetland sediments, which requires me going out an 1 hour drive to the delta, shoveling 30-50 x 5 gallon buckets worth, haul it up to the truck up a 40ft levy, then back, then screening and washing it through 1/8" screen, settling it, then allowing to dry to nice paste clay before using and capping with sand. Do this outside in the summer when it's 100F+ in Davis CA. You come home wet and muddy and what a wonderful smell of bog.

I'm just lazy and do not know what real work is I guess.

Regards,
Tom Barr














Regards,
Tom Barr

[Burks]

How long are we talking about baking sand/soil? I've found baking soil at 180F for 30 minutes in gardening but that was mainly to kill any bugs, microbes, etc.

[mrparker]

i baked mine for 20 minutes at 400.

[SCMurphy]

Originally Posted by lauraleellbp

Wow, Sean's first thread!?!

Guess his opinion of soil over time has changed... since he's the one who developed the mineralized soil method we've all been talking about recently.

My opinion of soil hasn't changed. I took my wetland soils class in 1988, started putting plants in pots with soil about then, nothing more adventurous than laterite in the substrate until after I finished grad school. When we moved to MD in 1991 I made the leap to a soil/clay sub-substrate using plain old gravel to cap it. I just didn't try to press the idea on people because I didn't want to be fixing their mistakes. This thread was intended to start a conversation, it did and I'm glad it did. When I posted this thread, the 'common suggestion' was to put peat under the gravel when setting up a planted tank. I was against that based on the idea that the amount of peat was not discussed until much later. I relaxed my opposition when the suggestion became a "dusting", not the inch(es) that some were having the misfortune of using.

I am amused by the changes in positions about soil that have happened since then.

Something came up in the forum for GWAPA about soil substrates. Someone said "more and more I'm starting to think that the substrate is the tank." That made me smile.

[anastasisariel]

I would never use creek pebbles again. You could never get something small with fine roots to ground and also, my shrimp used to swim in the spaces between it because it is so big and then they would die well below the substrate. I also lost an axolotl because he swallowed a creek pebble and it lodged in his intestine. Must have been a painful way to die!