A Little Tidying Up

On Friday, I got a few, uh, floating plants from a, uh, local fish store. I threw them in my 5-gallon tank to float around and soak up my 10-watt light. I also picked up an airstone for either attaching to a homemade CO2 system, or in the near term, hooking up some extra pipe to blow into. Good lung exercise. In addition, I dropped more cuttings from the 30-gallon in there with lead weights and I'll see if any of them stick. I even put the potted glassostigma in there, because there's no good place to have it in the 30-gallon anymore. Hopefully the runners that are in there will take. In the meantime, I hope it will stay alive in the 5-gallon in case I need more in the future. The potted stuff was already looking a little tired in the bigger tank, but it's pretty hard to "force it" to take the substrate. The roots are just too small to stay buried in the gravel, and it's not necessarily tall enough to bury the plant.

To get things started this morning, I went to Fintique to get some driftwood to start setting up boundaries to help to aquascape my jungle of a tank. Although I was looking for something bigger, maybe, I'm really happy with how the piece on the right turned out. There were bigger pieces available, but I didn't want to spend $20 on wood, so I used the best piece I found to kind of frame the foxtail and separate it from the moneywort and rotala. I'm going to try to get the stargrass going in front of it, and let whatever ground cover that happens to the left happen. The rotala is actually doing a pretty good job these days. The plant in the far, right, back corner that hasn't done much of anything would actually look awesome if it were spread out a little more, and as it is, one piece peeks up behind the moneywort nicely. Hopefully the water sprite doesn't have a problem taking a back seat to the foxtail, and it's actually pretty green right now. The hornwort is almost all gone (you can see through the tank in the middle), because it was just growing out of control. There's a smaller piece of driftwood to the left, and I'm hoping the sword on that side will dominate that part of the tank. I also picked up some java fern at Fintique; I don't know how healthy it is, but I'm hoping it takes root either in front of the hairgrass or on some driftwood.

Anyway, I think everything is in a good place now. I just need to stay on top of those water changes and hope that nitrates balance out. Speaking of which, I'm starting to rethink getting swept up in all this forum talk. The lady at Alamo Aquatics explained to me that she doesn't get too scientific about any of that stuff. She has about 50 neons in a 30-gallon planted tank, doesn't fertilize, doesn't inject CO2, and only changes water once every three months. I think there are rules of thumb, but there is also a time and place to just roll with what works despite conventional wisdom. I'll try to strike a proper balance.