About Me

I have personally kept aquarium / aquatic plants for about 2 years now and it has been a great success. It started out with some lumps and bumps but after a bit of researching and chatting to the professionals it all started to go well.

My first planted tank was only 2ft long. I began purchasing beginners plants such as Val, Corkscrew val and Egeria. But that wasnt enough! I wanted to plant something unusual in my tanks to make it stand out, thus I had the feeling of growing Lucky Bamboo in my tanks. Before keeping plants in aquariums, I loved lucky bamboo, I have over 20 plants around my house...both in water and in soil. But I thing I havent seen was planting the whole plant submerged for long periods. That idea got me going for the last 2 years and I have finally achieved that dream. Located in my catfish planted tank now is a lucky bamboo plant at approx 15cm high (was 5cm at the start) have been fully submerged for over 2 years now and still growing healthy and green. More info located in the Articles Section.

After a bit more of reading, and more researching, I discovered to create a tank to represent nature is quite easy. All I needed to do was plan everything out (from where each plant, ornament or driftwood is being placed, to how its going to look in the reality world) and take things slowly. Rushing the design process will just result in poor quality of aquascaping once all the pieces join together.

I was recommended by the professionals on different forums to invest in a CO2 (carbon dioxide) system. This will help improve and increase the plants growth as well as making them reproduce more rapidly. After a few runs to the lfs, I finally bought a Hagen / Netrafin CO2 system. It was quite cheap as I was saving large amounts of money each year from replacing plants. Its very pleasing to see the plants actually reproducing than dieing from the early stages when I was keeping plants. Instead of purchasing plants, I now have to ask people if they want plant cuttings as the plants grow and reproduce very often.

The biggest improvement I have achieved in my opinion is with the Anubias on the driftwoods. When I first started to keep Anubias on driftwood the leaves keep falling off and resulted in the plants beginning to die off, but once I upgraded the lighting to 2 15watt 6500K tubes, along with the CO2, but that time onwards, instead of dieing Anubias, I was propagating them each time a new bud is produced. I now have over 30 plants on Giant Anubias growing in other tanks from on large Anubias I purchased from the start. It is quite amazing and you will feel proud of what you have achieved. Basically 95% of all the anubias in my planted catfish tank is propagated from one giant Anubias.

Once one tank was completed, I already have plans on creating another planted tank. But this time was designed for plants only and only a minimum of fish. I was firstly designed to house a few catfish, but then later began housing guppy fry from my 2ft planted. So far its homed to 2 types of baby bristlenoses and about 20 baby guppies. The planning of this tank was much longer than my first tank, and aquiring different types of plants was quite long as well. I was very fussy on the quality of the plants thus completing this tank took about 3 months to produce. The lighting on the tank is about 2 X 30watt 6500K tubes and the tank size is only 6 gals. This tank have very high lighting and could cause an algal bloom any second now, but with the regular water changes and with the catfish in the tank, it just doesnt seem to happen. There is still room for about 2 more catfish. I was thinking 2 Otocinclus (Otto) or a Simease Algae Eater (SAE), both will take care of the algae on the plants.