GW and vacation and little on nitrogen

[Thomas Barr <tcbiii at earthlink_net>]

Some thoughts on GW and the vacation.
When a healthy well growing plant is supplied with a fair amount of NH4 as a
nitrogen source(fish/critter wastes) and suddenly you stop adding things
like PO4/K/Traces, the plant growth stops/shuts down. So does NH4 uptake.
But the NH4 is still being produced.....

The plant is often fine, but is just idling till there's more nutrients
available again. 

But if the fish waste etc is still being produced at the same rate, AND
there's a relatively small/no biomedia in the filter since someone might
feel "well plants prefer NH4" then this allows for GW and other algae to pop
up and bloom.

I've seen this dozens of times.

The production of NH4 is small but is fairly consistent, but the plants are
unable to remove it fast enough when they are stunted/not supplied regularly
with good nutrients.

Fish and critters often eat detritus/food/algae etc and still will produce
NH4 for sometime. This delay is often enough to allow a window for the start
of the GW before the NH4 runs out and while the plants are shut down.

This is a good reason to have a good filter biomedia etc and NOT to remove
your filter/media etc so you get this little added NH4 for the plants. The
plants do fine with NO3. Have a good filter for backup if nothing else,
better some filter bacteria than algae.

Regards, 
Tom Barr