Plant pics, and nutrient diff question

[BlazerFRS]

I recently received a few stems of R. macrandra and R. macrandra "Narrow Leaf" from czcz. Both are growing (pearling even, surprisingly enough), and both are slowly turing green. The narrow leaf is also getting some curling to it's old growth (check out the pics)... I'm not entirely sure if it was like that, or if i have some kind of deficiency.

Right now I use E.I. to dose. I've been adding:
1.2ppm of PO4 per week (.3 ppm every other day)
16 ppm of NO3 per week (4ppm same days as the PO4)
Plantex CSM+B to .1-.2ppm of Iron (each day on days I don't dose the macros)
I add ~20ppm of K after my weekly WC and another 20ppm midweek.
CO2 is >30ppm for sure. If you believe the CO2 chart, I've got 150ppm (5 dkh with pH of 6) but at 40ppm by this chart I was having BBA issues... so I assume I have a buffer in my tap water that's throwing it off. Anyway, the plants are happy and the fish show no signs of stress.
With this dosage my NO3 usually ends up about 15ppm at the end of the week, and my PO4 is generally quite low, .2ppm-.5ppm at then end of the week.
I'm upping my PO4 dosing to 2ppm per week in response to this.

Any thoughts on how hard I can cut the NO3 to bring back some reds?
Any other tips on my routine?

Thanks everyone.

 

[travis simonson]

I would restrict NO3 dosing so that you maintain around 8-10 ppm NO3. This can be tricky to do without and good test kit, but your R. macranda will be a good indicator to help you out. You might also increase PO4 dosing so that you maintain 1.0-1.5 ppm PO4 as this should also help bring out the red coloration in your R. macrandra. This should be easy to test for

 

[czcz]

Just to add 2cents to Hero's post, after increasing PO4 NO3 should drop, and I think you'll be able to adjust max levels with slight tweaking of the NO3 dose with observation. After keeping N low but available as plant mass and uptake increase, letting it crash for color becomes much easier, fwiw.

R. macrandra "narrow-leaf" has straight leaves, but I don't think you should worry too much about the pictured curling unless it continues as you propogate, fwiw.

That pearling is great. So are the other plants and puffer. Well done! Excited to see what you do with your plants and tank.

 

[BlazerFRS]

OK, so for now I'll up the PO4 to 2ppm/week, maybe with a larger initial dose after my weekly WC to help get it up early in the week. I'll also cut the NO3 to 12-10ppm/week or so and see how that goes.

Thanks gentlemen!