I've had very little to do with my tanks this week since everything has been running pretty smoothly in my tanks. But today was busy so prepare for me to ramble a bit. I'll do a TL;DR (too long; didn't read) summary for those who want to skip my long winded post
Morning- Small flake feed, test water params on both tanks, both fine. I had plans to replant a tank so i prepped a bucket for the afternoon WC. Note to anyone who cares, i need a couple of extra 20L buckets which i've walked past at the hardware 12 times this month. I've gotten so used to seeing buckets littering the house since developing MTS that i don't notice them anymore until i need to fill or empty one.
Lunchtime- Fed both Comets some peas as i normally do twice weekly for digestion and because they are mad for them. Today was just a treat. I'll give either oranges slices or corn tomorrow. Both comets will now eat orange slices from between my fingertips. Decided to start WC & replant when feeding was done and fish was settled. Moved it to my spare 20 for a while in its own water from 70% WC. Wet my foot with gravel vac filling the tank instead of a taller bucket
. I had been meaning to cut a longer tube for ages but also had a larger vac with no tube to fit. So i dried my foot and went to buy some tube for that. Saved about 10-15 minutes on WC with it when i got home but probably spent 45 minutes 'just looking' while at the hardware. It will be very handy to have when my 40g is running. Also looked at what was available for building an aquaponics set up to recycle some of my fish water in my spare room while at hardware. The spare room has a nice big window for lighting and all the space i should need for a gravity fed system. At some point i may expand it outdoors into a small greenhouse.
I got tired of trimming and replanting stem plants (mostly Ludwigia which filled close to 1/4 of my planting space) and bought some hang in store bags of tissue cultured Crypts yesterday. They've grown on me. C. Lucens went into my tank about 3-4 weeks back and did very little until last week or the week before when i added root tabs. Little guys are thriving now so i pulled about 1/3 of my stem jungle out and refilled those areas with C. Undulata 'Red' and C. Wedtii 'Brown' in 3 mixed zones. Hopefully they get some size to them fairly quickly with the addition of root tabs. Now i wait for the fill in process
Will try and get a picture tomorrow if it's looking good. Cabomba looks great when it's not completely covered in brown algae. I had forgotten why i put it in my tank recently. Algae seems to be changing to a black hard fibre type that clings to the edges of leaves. Entirely new to me after about 8 years of having aquariums. Plants bring a whole new set of issues but i still luv em.
It should have taken about one hour to do all that but took three (with a food stop and a dash to the hardware to avoid wet feet in future). When i buy the hang in store plant bags that allegedly have 5 plants in them, i carefully split the roots (which grow in agar jelly) to get 10-20 plants from each bag. It's delicate work but worth the effort to get so many plants out of one bag. I probably wound up with a bit more than i needed so i'll see if the LFS wants to throw a couple in their newly planted Nano scaping display tank. They actually started me on Crypts by giving me the sample bag they got when a new rep started offering the bags to show what the product would look like. I was going to buy it anyway as i wanted to try crypts so they won some loyalty at that time. I would really like to scape their tank for them since they have left it almost bare. Just 2 ferns and some Pygmy chain sword. One very nice stone though.
Anyway long ramble over. As promised the too long didn't read section. I added this and the intro when i was done. I can make a short story long
TL;DR
- Fed fish.
- Shopped for specific diameter tubing & checked available parts for another project i have in mind soon.
- Altered my plant scape to fit 2 types of Crypts.
- Spent way too long breaking a 2x5 packs of Crypts into 20+ plants.
