The Current Plant Stock

As explained in a fishkeeper's diary, the plant stock in the tank grew wild and fell back over the years. The picture of the tank shown below shows the situation as it was around the begining of 03. At that point, the plants were growing strongly, despite little in the way of added fertilisation. As with the rest of this site, there's not too much in the way of pictures yet as I'm not very good at photographing tanks, and until I get a digital camera, it's too slow and expensive to experiment a lot.

The Vallis group at the back of the left side of the tank began to grow wild and filled up the entire area. I pulled out large amounts, but it kept growing and growing. In the end, I decided to pull out most of it and plant something else there. I filled a very large salad bowl with plants and gave them to a neighbour. I never got around to filling the space, so it is still empty !!

One of the Amazon swords from the original planting is still with us. It also started growing wild and became rather too big for the space. I ended up removing the right-hand piece of mopani wood and pushing the plant over to the right to give it more space. Today (Dec 03) it fills the entire right-hand end of the tank and requires regular pruning to keep it from taking over.

Right in the middle (inside the curve of the central piece of wood) and over to the left of the tank are two small echinodorus. One of our first plants (ooh, years ago) was an echinodorus and it gave off a daughter plant. That in turn gave another, and these are from that. For some reason, neither of them will grow very much. They produce new leaves, but stay fairly small. Old leaves die off at about the same rate as new ones grow.

We also have an Echinodorus Rubin which is not shown in the picture above. Once I pulled out the mass of Vallis, I planted the Rubin in front of the space they took. This is doing pretty nicely, growing new leaves and reaching about two-thirds of the way up to the water surface.

The left and right hand pieces of wood have small growths of Java moss on in the picture above. This now grows wild and covers both of the pieces of wood still in the tank. I have to pull it off in large clumps on a regular basis as it would take over otherwise.

We also have some small Java ferns growing on the vertical stem of the middle piece of wood. I discovered these squashed in a corner where the left piece of wood leans on the glass. I carefully pulled them off and tied them to the middle piece and they are growing happily, albeit very slowly.

CO2

Although it has now been removed, this tank had a DIY CO2 injection on it for a long time. This was the standard water, yeast and sugar mixture in a plastic lemonade bottle. A thin pipe took the CO2 into the tank, where it filled an upturned plastic box as shown in the picture below.

You can just see the box hiding behind the (then small) Amazon sword. I often wonder if the Amazon sword grew so fast as it was right next to the CO2 box, so got the richest amount of CO2 of any plant in the tank. Dunno.

I added a small curved piece of pipe to the filter outlet to direct the water flow into the bottom of the CO2 box. This ensured that the CO2 diffused into the water well. I removed the CO2 some time ago and the plants seem to be doing OK. Not going wild, but not dying. One day I might get back to pushing these plants a bit more.