Ok first post here. I had a busy sunday yesterday. I spent the morning buying a few extra things in preparation for converting my 20g goldfish tank (which i recently added plants & C02 to). I looked over my stone collection and decided it was too varied and not interesting enough in general for my liking. So i packed a bag and walked to a local waterway near where i live in search of better rock.
I also plan to dirt a small tank as a shrimp tank with local flora and Australian shrimp. So i packed a few collection bags and walked to a lagoon that seasonally empties into a large creek. It's fairly dry now so i collected some aquatic looking plants that grow with a dry phase. I have about three species that i hope will do well.
- A Rosette plant which grows leaves up to about 10cm in the plants i saw. It has a tuber root which i am hoping i can train to grip a rock or driftwood. It grows a tiny violet flower as well.
-A running style plant that has small round leaves that are less than half a cm across. I found some anchored on the ground (fairly thick ground cover) as well as floating free in the water.
- I also swiped a small chunk of moss off the root of a tree that would normally be fully submerged. Hopefully that grows well underwater.
- A tube grass that may or may not grow submerged.
I'll be on the lookout for a native aquatic grass to add to my setup when i can get to more waterways. I plan to dirt the tank and use the dry start method i read about.
Anyway my main priority was to find rocks or a nice bit of driftwood that had already had some soaking. No good driftwood was to be found but i got some good black rock (a couple of pieces shot through with streaks of quartz) that i scrubbed and soaked in boiling water. When my bag had about 10kg of rocks and i couldn't find any different plants to take as specimens i went home. Scrubbed the rocks clean and soaked them in boiling water a few times and cleaned up my plant specimens and put them in some containers to get see how well they grow in different amounts of water (mud, muddy water with soil from where they were dug up and fish tank water).
I then drained some water from the tank into an esky (which is currently my largest back up fish tank) and gave them a water change. I then emptied the 20g, cleaned it and prepared it for the arrival of some dirted substrate. It took me till almost midnight to get done with layering the substrate, setting up my stone feature, planting and refilling the tank, but it's all starting to look good. The water is still very cloudy and i plan to fill the foreground with grasses, maybe look at reducing my stone feature which is taking up more space than i thought it would. I may do a water change today or tomorrow and look at adding my goldfish again (I plan to rehome them and get more interesting fish once my grasses go in).
