The Beginning of the End

I'm still a little behind real-time with my posts, but I want to keep things chronologically accurate.  I already have a new scape going well but I'll post about that in the future.  For now, I want to talk about the end of my first scape that placed my 1301 in the IAPLC 2019.

For a long time with this scape, I had battled algae.  I worked so hard, and did so many water changes.  I never let this get my down and kept fighting to keep a nice looking tank.  After my final competition shot, I even removed some of the most algae ridden plants and planted a ton of new stem plants.  Those looked good for a few weeks but ultimately, the algae had a hold.

I went out of town for 4th of July vacation and came back to a mess.  I just couldn't stomach the idea of trying to keep this scape alive any longer.  Here are some shots of what the tank looked like after I came back from a trip and then neglected it for a few more days.

You can see it was a mix of green dust algae, black beard and some other things.  It was honestly nice to know that I was going to tear it down and just see what would happen to it for a week or two.