Nutrient Juggling Act

Well, it's not as if I'd given the added calcium a whole lot of time to take effect, but some of the plants grow so fast (rotala indica, I'm looking in your direction) that I would have thought I'd seen some improvement today.

Because the Plantex has fewer nutrients than the Flourish micronutrient supplement, I added a dose of that to the aquarium while there were still a few hours of light, in hopes that would help, although I remained skeptical.

Further research into excess nutrients or nutrient toxicity indicates that it can present similar symptoms as nutrient deficiency. I was fairly certain though, that after my water change last night, that would have helped correct such a problem (for instance, phosphates were down near a more reasonable 2 ppm level). I hadn't checked iron (and in turn, the other micronutrients that are dosed at the same time) in a while, thinking I had overdosed with that, too. Granted the iron test is about the least reliable of the test kits, but I figured it would at least show up really pink and indicate I had too much. Lo and behold, it was devoid of any color. No iron (and maybe no boron, leading to the calcium deficiency syptoms)!

I guess I shouldn't have given up on dosing it this morning so prematurely! I need to start over-reacting to everything and just stay the course. If I kept up with EI, I probably would have seen improved growth this afternoon (and not ripped up a bunch of under-performing rotala). So back to EI tomorrow (probably micros and potassium), and hopefully better new growth (and less algae). In addition to the green spot algae, I'm seeing hints of BGA here and there despite my high nitrate load. Go figure.