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.