Fish tank: Stage 3

After doing a little more reading about planting fish tanks, I realised that the state of my plants needed to be changed. I had planted them as they came from the shop – in bundles of 5-6 stems, and touching or protruding from the surface of the water.

You can see in the above picture the three main groupings of plants.

What I did was this:

1. Untie the lead (?) wire keeping the plant stems together at the bottom;
2. Sort the plant stems according to height, and then halve the tallest ones, taking care not to cut away new roots. These are generally easy to identify as pale white strands which protrude from joints in the plant stems;
3. I then removed any leaves which appeared to be dead or dying (easily identified by their lack of colour), and removed any leaves (whether dead or new) near the bottom of the plant; any leaves buried would only burden the plant as they contribute nothing toward photosynthesis;
4. Re-group the new plant cuttings with 2-3 stems per group, and replant, taking care to ensure the roots were covered by the substrate

So, this is what my tank looks like now:

As you can see, there are now plants all across the tank horizontally. Until they grow and thicken the coverage, there is still not a lot of places to hide for my rasboras, so they will continue to hide at the back under the filter until I can provide them some more places to hide. I have read that the more places fish have to hide, the more likely they are to come out, as they know a safe place is not far away.

I will hopefully soon aquire some drift wood and river rocks to put in the tank. I’ll have to do some ‘research’ (looking at other peoples’ established tanks) to get a feel for tank layouts that not only look nice but also provide plenty of areas for the fish to enjoy.

The hardest part of setting up this fish tank has so far been my lack of patience. Most other personal projects that I work on only happen at the speed I can complete them or at the speed of my computer – this fish tank, however, requires I wait for mother nature (helped along in some respects) to do her thing. Hopefully I will learn to be patient! I will have to, or I risk wasting my time, and money, and worst of all, I risk killing my fish!

So far so good, however.