Grissom's dirted tank

Hi everyone,

I was going to wait until I had everything done with this tank but I am quite excited about it and decided that 1/3 of the fun is the setup, another 1/3 is the discussion and the final 1/3 is the completed project so I will show what I have done so far.

First I prepared the soil.


Washing


Drying and mineralizing:

 

Adding the soil


Capping with Fluorite:

Capping with inert black sand:

 

Adding rocks and wood:



At the moment I have filled the tank about half way with water. Tomorrow I will add a heater. Will probably plant either tomorrow or Tuesday.

 

I see fresh spiderwood, better lock that down well, it floats pretty damn well!

Looking forward to this!

 

Looks awesome!

Just out of interest, how long did the prep take for the lawn dressing? Being winter and all I mean. Thinking of doing it myself in the next few days but just want to make sure I don’t rush into the other stuff before it’s ready haha


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Its pretty in there. Time will tell I guess

 

One weekend. Washed it and removed the floating stuff. Then let it dry in my driveway. Next day I repeated this. Then I added it to the tank. I let it sit in the tank for a few weeks as I did all of this in the first week of lock down and could not get any inert black sand until last weekend.

 

Unless there are stones on top, it will break free of the substrate and your hopes and dreams of it staying put

 

Me too. Plan is to put 1 or 2 needle leaf Java ferns on the spider wood, then a few small growing anubias on the rocks to contrast with all the pointiness. Then the rest of the tank will be a cobra grass lawn if all goes according to plan.

 

Thanks

 

There are not stones. Its wedged in the gap between the stones and the glass. I was pretty confident it would stay put - now you are causing doubts. Will check it out in the morning again and see if I can put a rock somewhere to keep it in place. Took me an hour to decide on how I wanted it to be - and its only 2 pieces so there weren't many options

 

Why not try weight the base of them if you don’t want rocks? Silicon them onto a plate of some kind and then just dress with gravel again as is?

Probably not as simple as it sounds in my head but lockdown did that to me


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Won’t let me edit but I should say *if they float and you need to weight them down, nothing like a full water test


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Looking forward to it! My own dirted tank experiment failed due to my lighting scheme, so i'll be watching this closely

 

I got a piece of rusted rebar. Scrubbed it down and tied my spiderwood to it with silicone and fish line. Pushed it down into the substrate till right to the bottom. Planted on top of it and the plants actually loved the extra iron that leached from the rebar.

 

Did you find any color leaching from it though? Or any discoloring on the base of the tank?


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I tested it this morning - I really doubt its going to float. It has quite a large base which I have covered in sand. And as I said I wedged them against each other and the tank glass. Time will tell. Tank is now 3/4 full of water. I guess another hour or so and then it will be full.

 

Besides I have seen Hendre's status updates on his Wattsapp and seems his physics exam was a bit of a killer. I am pretty confident I have this.

 

Throws the man under a bus

Just remember, pics or it didn’t happen....


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