Spent about 5 hours working on the tank today.
A lot of the plants had really long bare stalks because the few leaves they would grow got all covered in BBA or the fish would nibble and tear them, so I would trim them. They also seemed to be stretching themselves up towards the surface (greater atmospheric CO2 up there? probably). After adding CO2 the result was lots of leaves up by the surface (even growing above the water) on long, mostly bare stalks.
So I pulled up all the plants and cut their stalks off, did a really big water change and gravel vac, cleaned the glass, replanted everything and scrubbed the rocks and driftwood with my algae scrubbing toothbrush. I also elevated the lights about 2 inches.
Excited to see how it goes.
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