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.