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This website documents my experiences with New World Cichlids in the planted tank.
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Information
The Planted Aquarium...to be continued...
The aquatic gardner is much like a cook. You can buy a fancy oven, get great recipes and ingredients but it takes time and experience to become a good cook. Sure some are lucky and some are naturals but just remember things may not work out the first time around. Keep trying and never stop learning.
The best thing you can do is get involved with the hobby and meet others doing the same things. You will learn much quicker and save lots of cash. The second best thing you can do is suck in your ego or whatever it is inside of some of us to challenge ourselves. Begin with easy plants and simple setup. The difference between my tanks and the best looking in the world is focus. If you are looking for a spectacular looking aquascape DO NOT start with the hardest plants in the book in a high light tank. Take it easy. One thing I regret is not taking the easy route and looking nice. My focus was on fish and difficult plants. Collection & growth not aquascaping. Looking back I wish I had taken the easy route and had some nice aquascapes under my belt. Simple is better.
The Natural Planted Tank is a great start if your interested in a slower pace low light setup. I find the Natural Planted Tank "rules" a bit limiting and create similar setups only dosing trace nutrients and using various forms of carbon.
When starting the high tech planted aquarium stick with one well known technique and learn from there. In short do not try to reinvent the wheel. Use a technique like Estimated Index to get a great start on things. This technique is for heavily planted tanks. 'EI' is geared towards higher tech tanks and is a full proof fertilizing technique. There are other techniques out there which are more refined but be wary of anything including calcium or magnesium as it will create undesirable water parameters for soft water cichlids. EI is considered to be wasteful. Over dosing and such frequent water changes are not ideal. I began with EI, learned from it and now run similar fertilizing plan with lower, more frequent dosing and less water changes.
Be patient and do your best to be consistent. You will not learn much bouncing around in the beginning. Only make one change at a time so you are able to learn from your experimenting. It takes consistency to learn cause and effect in the planted aquarium.
Run lighting on timers to keep lighting durations consistent. Avoid drastic changes in light duration.
Match lighting and fertilization according to plant mass. If your just starting a new tank and have little plant mass then use short light duration. Start out short around 6-8 hours for typical lighting.
Never fall into the trap of thinking longer light duration will help speed things up. I noticed light durations exceeding 9 hours cause nuisance algae. Excessive light durations cause me little bit of blue green algae between the front glass and substrate. Excessive light durations cause me green algae on the glass of the aquarium. One time I extended the light duration thinking I would grow myself out of the mess I was in but that only prolonged my agony.
I published The Hierarchy of Plant Needs. The purpose of this information is to provide basic understanding of plant needs. Understanding how one factor effects another is key to finding that proper ratio and achieving a balanced tank.
Good luck with your planted tank.
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