Sucks about the melted leaves but with the heat were having not a huge surprise. Just clean them up real good and put them in a healthy tank. You'll have some nice leaves in no time!
Yeah this was back at the end of May when the weather started to change from warm to incinerator hot. Massive anubias from a larger setup and the box got sun baked. 2 months has yielded about 2.5 leaves per 6" of rhizome LOL.
Miracle grow organic top soil is a bag of sticks. I'll sell you some sticks if you really want them. They're mostly unusable carbon with a tiny mineral component.
If you really want to buy soil in a bag, buy Scott's topsoil.
If you really want the good stuff, go more or less anywhere and get a few shovel fulls of dirt.
Miracle grow organic top soil??? is what? a misprint/mispost?
MG topsoil has a good bit of animal waste in it.
Is MG potting mix what your referring to as a bag of sticks?
If so then I'm responding to that.
"MG organic potting mix is a bag of sticks. They're mostly unusable carbon with a tiny mineral component."
The 'sticks', bark, ground leaf litter and other organic materials contained in the bag do what when placed in an aquarium submerged in water? Bacteria does something with it I can assure you.
Carbon contained in those 'sticks' is exactly what is released by the bacteria chewing up the organics causing bubbles/gas to be released from NPT substrates. Submerged decomposition/mineralization provides CO2 (carbon) for the plants.
Without writing a book or stealing another's work here the method of producing mineralized soil for aquarium use deals with exactly this event. The repeated wet/dry cycles accelerates the break down of the organics and renders it to the mineral base material. Organics and the associated carbon binding it together/ are eliminated. This makes the nutrient component immediately available to the plants. But the trapped carbon is lost prior to use.
Debate continues over which is best or lasts longer which isn't the point of this post.
Nowhere in any of the discussion of mineralized soils do you read any claims of it providing carbon for the plants. The organic materials which do contain carbon is what the end product of MTS eliminates. But the NPT method provides exactly that, and in my opinion it's more for less effort :smile:. Organic materials left in the soil and placed in the substrate are known (proven) to provide carbon via the biological breakdown preformed by Heterotrophic Bacteria. This provides not just CO2 (POC & DOC) but it makes available the N, P, S, C to the plants that was trapped in those 'sticks'.
The submerged decay of organics basically is a time release of all the energy captured in the original growth of the plant materials contained in that bag of sticks back into the aquarium for the plants to make use of it again.
On the shelf here is D. Walstad's book and it in large part is the basis of this post along with what I've seen in tank here over the years. The information it contains is scientific in nature, verified and (imo) well written. It details and explains directly the topic and error of your statement.
