Dry Start Method

I always knew I liked the look of a nice lush carpet.  Aquascapes that had them always stood out to me as being more impressive and complete.  From reading, the easiest method to ensuring a nice dense healthy carpet at the start was using the Dry Start Method.  I won't go into the details but I had been patient enough to this point, what's another month or two to wait.  At this point, my ADA Cube Garden Glass Stand still isn't here, I haven't bought the CO2 system I want yet from Green Leaf Aquariums.  Many things told me that the DSM was the right thing to do.

Again, I'll start with my end state picture and then take you on the journey.

So, I had been waffling between with Micranthemum (Monte Carlo) and Hemianthus callitrichoides (HC Cuba) for my carpeting plant.  Everywhere I've been reading people seem to talk about HC being harder and MC being good for beginners.  I was pretty set on MC being the beginner that I am.

Now, time for some more luck.  A good friend of mine owns a company across the street from my office.  They do research on water contaminates and as such have fish and tanks in their building.  I mentioned to my buddy that I was getting into this hobby one day when I was admiring a tank he has.  He mentioned a guy who works for him is super into aquascaping.  I couldn't believe it.  I had to meet this guy.  I wanted a real life person to bounce my ideas and questions off of.  I immediately have my friend him take me to the back of their building where I find this guy has a few nano tanks he scapes at the office.  These nano tanks are decked out high tech tanks with lush carpets and plants growing to the brim.  He told me owning a fish tank is a pretty niche hobby and getting into planted tanks is a niche hobby inside a niche hobby. He later offered to help start me out with some MC since he was about to do a trim.  This is what he gave me.

Yes, that's a quarter for comparison.  He said he has like a 4 inch thick mat of MC on his home tanks and this was just a thinning for him.  He warned me that there would likely be some snails and other random plants and mosses in there but I didn't really care.   I was about to spend $40 or $50 on MC tissue culture and this allowed me to start the Dry Start as thick as I wanted.  Hopefully I'll be able to get some other fun stuff from his trimmings in the future.

Rather than going to heavy on the initial planting I wanted to know for sure that the carpet was actually growing.  I made up about 30 bunches and also had 4 mini dwarf hairgrass bunches to plant.  Here is another angle of the end result.  I had seem similar spacing in most DSM videos so I felt pretty good about where I ended.  I also posted this to /r/PlantedTank and got awesome feedback.  

At this point, I misted the tank until the water was just below the level of the substrate in the front.  I covered up the top of the tank as tightly as I could with plastic wrap and set a timer on my light for 12 hours a day.  I open it once a day for about 20 minutes to get some fresh air in there and also mist the banks as they dry out quicker.

We'll Do It Live

It was time.  I had my tank, light, substrate, stones and wood.  Let's put it all together.  First, the final product, then the journey.

First, as I had mentioned in a previous post, I was using ADA substrates.  I don't know enough to not follow the proven system by Amano.  I didn't buy any of the additional substrate additives but I did use ADA Power Sand Advance Small which comes with stuff already in it.

I used the entire bad of Power Sand and was sure not to have it near the edges so that it wouldn't show once I added the ADA Aquasoil Amazonia.  Below is where I landed after my first attempt. 

After some good feedback from /r/PlantedTank I added much more slope to the back of the tank on both sides, rotated the spider wood piece the strecthes out to the left so it would point more towards the front as well as added a few more accent stones to the left side.  The end state is at the top of this post and I let things sit for a few days as I started planning out what plants I was going to order for doing a Dry Start.

Here are some more pictures of the final end state.

Hardscaping

If watching endless hours of aquascaping videos on YouTube taught me anything, it was that you needed to take your time on your hardscaping.  Watching Amano, he would just sit there and stare at his tank.  Move a rock 1 inch then stare at it before moving it right back.  I knew I had to get this part just right.

I live in Gainesville, FL and we are lucky to have a pretty decent LFS (Local Fish Store, some dope lingo I picked up on the blogs) named Aquatropics.  I was able to find Okho Dragonstone as well as some pretty nice Spiderwood over the course of a few months.  I wasn't sure what I was gonna do so I bought more stone than I needed.  I got like 20 lbs of stone for like $80 and spent like $60 or so on two large pieces of spider wood.  They were willing to take returns for store credit for anything I didn't need so that was nice to know.

Before my tank came I knew I needed to start practicing.  I took a cardboard box and cut it to the exact dimensions of the 60P tank I had coming.  This would let me play around and get some opinions online.  I had posted a thread to /r/PlantedTank with limited success.  You can see those initial attempts here.  They were mostly pretty bad looking back but I was just trying to figure out what was possible with the wood.  I had been planning on a left to right flow based on where I was going to put the tank in my house but after my wife recommended somewhere else for the tank, the right to left layout looked better.  It also worked better with the Spiderwood I had.

I really liked how it highlighted the fattest part of the main piece of Spiderwood.  You'll see in later posts that this is almost exactly what I ended up going with.

If I were to give any advice, I would suggest this tip for people.  Practice your hardscaping and ask for opinions.  Doing this in the cardboard box let me easily move things around without fear of scratching my tank or breaking anything.

Aqua Forest Aquarium

If you live in the US and you want ADA gear, you know all about Aqua Forest Aquarium.  Guess I better get to know these guys since I'll be sending them a lot of business over the next few months.

It was now like August 2018 and I had decided on a ADA 60P tank.  From my reading this was a classic size and was manageable for a beginner.  I wouldn't have to break the bank on hardscaping with stone and wood.  With less than a few hundred bucks I should be able to land a large enough amount of plants to get a solid start.  This size tank also posed less of a challenge to find a good place in my home for it to live.  I wanted it to be in my living room where I can see it all the time.

At this point I had my 60P tank in hand.  I had started gathering some other random stuff like ADA Aqua Soil Amazonia and ADA Power Sand.  If I wanted to really get this thing started, I really just needed the light.

I love the look of the ADA Aquasky Moon.  It was just so expensive.  I had been following George Farmer on YouTube for a few months and he seemed to use Twinstar on most of his tanks.  After a lot of research I was pretty sure this would be where I break away from ADA.  Guess I was wrong, destiny wanted me to have the Moon.

One day I called Aqua Forest Aquarium to check on the status of the ADA Cube Garden Glass Stand I had ordered from them.  They didn't have them in stock at the time so I had to special order from Japan.  It was gonna take up to a few months which was why I went ahead and ordered it a while back.  I got to talking with George Lo, the owner about the different light options between the Twinstar the Aquasky G and the Aquasky Moon.  I told him I really loved the look of the moon and was considering just going for it.  George said he didn't have any and would have to special order one.  He wasn't even sure if he could get them anymore.  That was when he made me an offer I couldn't refuse.  He offered me the display unit from his store for 50% off.  He said it was only used for about a year and was in good condition.  I jumped on it right that second.  With shipping I was able to get the ADA Aquasky Moon 601 w/ Mirror Unit for $255.  That would have normally been about $500 after shipping.

I have been getting so lucky so far.

Equipment Equipment Equipment

Man do I love the equipment for aquascaping.  I was immediately drawn to everything, the glass lily pipes, glass diffusers, glass CO2 checkers, rimless tanks, bubble counters, glass check valves, you name it.  I saw the ADA superjet and the thing looked so awesome I knew I wanted one.   Once I knew a superjet was on my wishlist, my wife insisted that I get the all glass stand to show that badboy off.  Sure I could get an Eheim and hide the ugly thing in a cabinet but the scientist in me just loved the glass and stainless steel.  I knew I wanted the aquarium to be the focal point, but I want people to see the whole setup and be in awe.  Something like this, but also with an awesome CO2 tank at the bottom opposite the filter.

At this point all I had done was started a spreadsheet of what I wanted and where I could get it.  Also trying to track what things would cost so I could have some idea of how much I'd be spending and how quickly I could piece this thing together.

June 28th was the day.  I found The Green Machine videos and ended up on their website.  To my astonishment they were having a going out of business sale.  I knew this was my chance.  I could get some top notch stuff at prices I knew I'd never see again.  I jumped in hard and bought a ADA Super Jet Filter ES-600 with H36cm Pipes and ADA Pollen Glass Diffuser - Large - 20mm.  I had wanted to buy a tank and a stand too but they talked me out of the stand since the shipping would have cost as much as the stand.  They were also concerned about shipping the tank.

Superjet is normally like $750 or so and I was able to get it brand new for a little over $400 with shipping. The diffuser was normally like $140 and I got it for $55 after shipping.

This was it, I was going all in. I figured, I've already saved so much money.

An Idea Was Born

Back in college at UF, I had a 38 gallon bowfront that I went in on 50/50 with a roommate.  We had some cichlids and other random fish with some lives plants but nothing too crazy.  At the time I didn't know aquascaping was a thing.  This was 1999-2000 so I guess it really wasn't a huge thing.  I had a few other friends with tanks in college who also had some plants growing.  Pretty simple stuff really but we liked it.  Plants seemed to grow pretty well without doing much.  We dosed something in that tank, but I have no clue what it was.   I would change the water once every few months or so if that.  Eventually I moved out of that apartment and left my half of the tank to the roommates.

Here we are in 2018 and I found out my brother in law had been doing planted tanks for a few years.  I saw show pictures of his and that got me looking around on the internet.  This is when I found Takashi Amano.  I started watching video after video.  I knew this was it, this was the stuff I wanted.  I wanted a tank just like his.  Come to find out, ADA makes the most expensive stuff there is but it was too late, I had decided that was what I wanted.  If I was going to get back into this and try aquascaping for real, I wanted to get the best money could buy right off the bat since I knew I was going to enjoy the hobby.

Time to start saving my money and figure out how to make this a reality.  While I'm posting this in September of 2018, this idea started around March of 2018.

Here was one layout from Tropica that inspired me.