Hi there Planted Tank people!

I've just planted a 10 gallon Betta tank with ADA Amazonia "Nature Tank" (if it makes a difference).

question #1

how long should I expect it to be leeching so much ammonia? I'm on day #8 of 50% daily water changes and the ammonia is finally going down a bit. I've seeded the HOB filter with media from a mature tank.

question #2.

at what point should I start fertilizing the water column feeders, and at what point should I expect to start dosing the root feeders with whatever they need that's not in the soil (i.e. minerals?)

Thank you much in advance.

A couple of pics

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#1 YMWV, but generally speaking 4 weeks is a normal amount of time until the leaching is down to enough where the tank can uptake and you can put in livestock. No reason to rush this. Let the plants start growing and help purify the water and then start slowly with livestock and keep up good water changes.

#2 The water column vs root feeder thing is a myth in the sense that certain plants won't live if you don't root feed. All plants will uptake nutrients from the water column so you don't have to worry about doing both. The aquasoil is loaded so any "root feeder" will do very well with the aquasoil and water column dosing.

With aquasoil you really only need to dose potassium and micros for at least 6 months or longer depending on plants, demand, etc. You should start dosng from the getgo.

My last two tanks with ADA started slowing way down on producing ammonia at about the 3 week period. That or the plants and bacteria caught up with it; hard to say. You can start dosing K and micros right away and a test kit can tell you if you need PO4. I don't use any sort of root tabs so will let others opine on that.

@Asteroid thanks for the reply. I'm not in a rush just curious about the timeline.

I think the ammonia must be really feeding the BB because tonight I'm getting a comparatively low reading (<25 pom) but the nitrites spiked.

I saw a video by Cory of Aquarium Co-Op who explained how Aquasoil lowers the pH and thus the plants require micro dosing but my PH hasn't lowered (yet) and the plants are growing (small swords have new leaves).

I've got a bottle of AC Easy Green around.

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@Blueridgereef thanks for the info. So far looks like three weeks is average. As just mentioned, perhaps seeding the filter really helped things along because right after posting I'm suddenly getting <25 ppm/ammonia and a nitrite spike and this is only 9 days in

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Start your routine when most of the plants start slowing down or showing signs of malnutrition.

Remember that plants will always have a few leaves that are dying or look bad, especially older leaves.

Ok but what about the rhizomes?

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