Jinxing Myself

Well, I don't know if I was overly optimistic before, or the resumption of my normal routine was a mistake, but it's time to stop declaring victory over the algae. I was not happy at what I saw upon my return from Thanksgiving. Besides the fact that the green algae is gowing on everything including thick sheets on the glass and equipment, the beard algae is not simply annoying covering the fringes of my broad-leaved plants, it's growing on surfaces of leaves, stems, grass, and grount cover. It's gotten so bad in the high-growth areas, that the algae is gowing across leaves and needles to almost form a coherent structure.

It was time to hack off all the growth decimated by algae. So many leaves and stems were completely overwhelmed by either green hair or brush algae, that I decided they had to go. This way, the viable parts of the plants below them might actually get some light, and I could more easily track how well I was doing by observing how long the less overwhelmed growth held off the algae. This was emotionally difficult to do, seeing as most of the trimmings had to be thrown away instead of cultivated. A few that were borderline were replanted, but most of them were beyond saving.

A lot of the research I did indicated that phosphate was a limiting factor for algae, so that even when everything else was present in abundance, if there was not enough phosphate available, the algae would not thrive. Phosphate beads ran a little high at the LFS, so I settled for a product called Phos-X I found at PetCo. It is a packet of something or other that is supposed to remove phosphates (and nitrates) from water, so I dropped it in the filter with the hope that it will deprive my algae of much-needed phosphates. I'll keep up with the (phosphate-free) liquid fertilizers to replace the nitrates it may take out of the water, and also give the plants something to eat and encourage them to compete with the algae for the remaining phosphates.