Hi everyone - I thought I would start a journal for my Spec V kitchen tank. I just picked up the hobby earlier this year and this is my first attempt at any kind of aquascape, still have a long ways to go to catch up with some of the amazing tanks on here but it's a step up from where I started with fake decorations from Petco. (here's a link to my other tank: https://www.plantedtank.net/forums/11336565-post2144.html)
A couple of things I learned - I think it was a mistake not doing a dry start. For at least the first two weeks I was constantly replanting uprooted HC.. I tried reducing/redirecting the flow and they would still come up every day. Then the tank started getting hair algae, and several clumps would uproot at a time all strung together (forget manually removing it, tugging on it at all would just uproot the HC again). I wish I would have taken some pictures of the tank at its worst in the first month - I was almost ready to scrap it and try a different plan, but kept stubbornly replanting and eventually it took.
Also somewhere around a month in, the HC started turning yellow and everything pretty much stopped growing. I was only dosing Flourish at the time and think the tank ran out of macros - I switched to Thrive+ and it almost immediately turned back around and started healthy growth again. It's been going a lot better since doing that and getting the Co2 dialed in, here's some progress pictures:
6/25 (Still cloudy from planting)
7/19
8/1
8/30
Anubias starting to bloom:
Yellow golden-backs (I got these from @Discusluv on the for sale board here - there's about 50 shrimplets now!):
A couple of things I learned - I think it was a mistake not doing a dry start. For at least the first two weeks I was constantly replanting uprooted HC.. I tried reducing/redirecting the flow and they would still come up every day. Then the tank started getting hair algae, and several clumps would uproot at a time all strung together (forget manually removing it, tugging on it at all would just uproot the HC again). I wish I would have taken some pictures of the tank at its worst in the first month - I was almost ready to scrap it and try a different plan, but kept stubbornly replanting and eventually it took.
Also somewhere around a month in, the HC started turning yellow and everything pretty much stopped growing. I was only dosing Flourish at the time and think the tank ran out of macros - I switched to Thrive+ and it almost immediately turned back around and started healthy growth again. It's been going a lot better since doing that and getting the Co2 dialed in, here's some progress pictures:
6/25 (Still cloudy from planting)


7/19

8/1

8/30



Anubias starting to bloom:

Yellow golden-backs (I got these from @Discusluv on the for sale board here - there's about 50 shrimplets now!):
