Planted Aquarium Progression Thread

[jclyde13]

I had to be out of town for the past week, and I was interested to see how much my plants would grow during my time away, since I added pressurized CO2 fairly recently (about a month ago), so I decided to take before and after pics. The amount of growth I got actually surprised me, and I ended up deciding to make a thread documenting the whole progression my tank has gone through, from startup to present, and beyond. Pics will be up soon.


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[jclyde13]

So this is how it began. I had a 25g grow out tank running as a bare bottom in my dorm room at school, and I had recently gotten my friend into the hobby, and he'd taken an interest in live plants. I've had a planted 10 gallon planted tank before, so I knew the basics at least, so we talked about plants a lot for a couple weeks... long story short, I wanted to get back into live plants. Lol. I went out and bought some flourite, Rotala rotundifolia, and dwarf hairgrass. Also added a pathetic little amazon sword and java fern that had been barely clinging to life in my 36 gallon tank. Both plants were originally from my old 10 gallon, and both eventually died off in the 25.




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[jclyde13]

After a couple months, my green severum destroyed the hairgrass, I removed the dead amazon sword and bought another to put in its place, as well as some Ludwigia repens and water sprite, and I added a clipping of Anubias nana from my 36 gallon. I also cut and replanted the new growth on the Rotala, and discarded the old stems.




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[jclyde13]

About a month after that, I decided to replace the 25 gallon with a 40 breeder (partly to give myself more time before I'd have to move the growouts to the 225, but mostly to satisfy my aquarium addiction). This is unfortunately the only pic I have from this point in the progression (cloudy from having just added the new substrate).




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[jclyde13]

Over the next couple weeks, I added more lights, something like 30-40 stems of Bacopa monnieri, 4-5 stems of Cabomba caroliniana, and a couple long stems of Brazilian pennywort which I cut up into several smaller plants.




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[jclyde13]

I don't have another full tank shot to go along with this and I'm not sure how much time elapsed from the last pic to this one, but this is after I added some Hemianthus glomeratus and what I believe to be Micranthemum umbrosum (slightly to the left of the H. glomeratus) to the tank.




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[jclyde13]

a few more weeks of growth, a major rescape, and the addition of CO2...




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[jclyde13]

Now this is the picture I took before going out of town for a week. I believe it was about a week after the previous pic. I had just chopped down and replanted the Rotala rotundifolia.




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[jclyde13]

And now, the current pics. I came back home this afternoon to an algae-filled tank, which is probably because my tank is used to getting 2-3 big water changes per week, but everything grew pretty substantially. The H. glomeratus grew about 3-4", the Cabomba put on about 4" (after never seeming to do much in the past), pennywort almost reaching the surface, and Ludwigia grew about 2-3" as well.

This is what it looked like when I got home.




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[jclyde13]

Cleaned off the glass and manually removed most of the algae from the plants and lava rock.




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