[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Diane Walstead style tank
I set up an All Glass Mini Bow tank in my office according to Walstead's
instructions last July and it has been the most delightful tank! It has 6
White Clouds in it and I planned on an oto but never added one because it's
never had a trace of algae so far. (I've only been doing this a year and a
half and have set up one other tank with gravel and laterite and two with
Flourite - 3 watts per gallon in each tank - they've all gone through algae
stages and need algae eaters to help keep things looking nice.)
The Mini Bow, in case you haven't seen one, has its own hood with a 14 watt
light built in, so it has 2 watts per gallon of light. I taped the bottom
to keep the soil from being exposed to light right from the start. There
is no natural light where the tank is, only it's own flourescent and office
flourescent during office hours. I do use a DIY yeast reactor for the
tank, and the way I do it is bring a reactor that is slowing down on a
10-gallon in to the office and hook that up. I'm not trying to inspire
rampant growth with it but to keep the ph out of cichlid ranges.
Choosing soil was also a problem for me. Native soil was out of the
question in my mind. In my part of Colorado the "soil" is a hard clay that
grows something like one clump of native grass per square foot (or one huge
cactus per 4 square feet). Kill off the native grass and you'll never see
anything but dryland noxious weeds again. Any soil that's better in the
area I would suspect has been improved with all sorts of
additives. Anyway, I spent considerable time going to local stores and
reading the labels on potting soil sacks. If they didn't list contents, I
rejected them. If they listed earthworm castings and/or manure, I rejected
them. If they listed perlite, etc., I rejected them. I finally chose a
stuff called Green Thumb All-Purpose Potting Soil from LaPorte, Indiana,
that lists soil, peat and humus. I sifted it through a collander to get
rid of any lumps and bits of stick, etc., that I suppose are from the peat
but didn't presoak. I think it does have some perlite or something in its
since there are some grayish bits that float sometimes but it's not a
terrible amount and it's a minor annoyance.
The gravel is from a local fish store that uses it in their tanks and is
called something like Tech Minerals or maybe Tek Minerals and has
individual bits from whitish through the brown ranges to an occasional bit
of black.
I set the tank up at home and filled it and let it sit at least a week
before draining it and taking it to work where I planted it and set it up
again with the DIY yeast reactor and planted it. It sat with plants only
for at least two weeks before I added the White Clouds. The tank has a
small piece of driftwood, and I started with hygrophila polysperma,
limnophila sessiliflora (thanks again, Chuck Gadd), java ferns, crypt
wendtii and crypt parva, dwarf sag, hydrocotyle, and anacharis for the
floating plant Ms. Walstad recommends. The anacharis never flourished and
now the tank has duckweed in it that I keep to just a small patch.
The hygro was never meant for long-term and sure enough it stalled in the
beginning but then grew like mad and started looking ratty from too many
top butchings. One drawback to this tank is that replanting and moving
brings soil to the surface and can make a horrible mess. To remove the
hygro, I siphoned tank water into a temporary container and moved the fish
there, then pulled the hygro, then siphoned soil like crazy and let the
filter run with some floss until the water was clear enough I didn't think
it would kill the fish and put them back. That's the only time I had to do
that and I wouldn't be so worried about a fast grower like hygro to keep
algae from starting in a tank like this again and wouldn't start with hygro
in it. The limno takes the top butchings fairly well for a long time and
is easier to uproot and replant when it needs it and it looks lovely in
this tank, so I keep it. Everything else except the hydrocotyle is going
great. The hydrocotyle has had consistently pale and small leaves, but it
looks so nice growing over the driftwood I keep leaving it hoping it gets
inspired. The crypts are all bigger than I expected them to get, which is
a bit of a disappointment with the parva, since it's supposed to be a
foreground plant and I expected an inch or 2 and it's more like 4.
The only negative I can see about a tank like this is if you're a chronic
plant mover arounder (and I am with the other tanks), it stops you because
of the way the dirt comes up when you uproot. I'm not as worried about it
as I was in the beginning because when I pulled all the hygro and really
made that tank a murky mess it still didn't start an algae outbreak, but I
do wonder if there's just something about this little tank that makes it
stay so nice and I wouldn't be so lucky with another set up the same way.