Subject: Re: NANFA-L-- plants and soil
From: Todd Crail (farmertodd at buckeye-express.com)
Date: Wed Sep 29 2004 - 15:47:37 CDT
Thanks for asking Laura. As best as I can tell, it's working wonderfully.
I've have some extraneous problems that I've had to work with... So some
things have not been solved in my mind, but as a whole, I think it's a fine
plan, and would endorse it to be an experiment for others. Time will only
tell wether it should be endorsed as a viable first plan for most
fishkeepers.
What I do know at this time is... Holey moley, does val dig it! It was
growing immediately, only pausing a couple days before sending off the
rhizomes. Usually, when having been ripped from its substrate in my
experience, it takes a month or so to stabilize and grow 100% of the
transplants (like 5% start colonization immediately, but the rest resume
under a gradient from that point in time). Not so in this situation... I'd
say 40% sent off rhizomes the first week. I'm already ripping out the
hornwort, and I had a lot of surface area to cover! :)
With the halides and the soil, I'm having great success for the first time
with Potamogeton. The shoot I brought home (were broken out of substrate
when we were sampling) has taken root, produced 5 leaves in 4 weeks, the
first two of which are waxing up. I was excited to see this, considering
some of the environmental things that have been going on.
The problem I need to solve is tannins. The tank gets mightily yellow after
about a month. After an 80% waterchange (which will be explained later in
this email) I could see end to end without any "yellowing". Within a week,
it's "yellowed" to about 3', in the following week, it's "yellowed" at about
1". I have yet to determine if the source is from the soil or a very large
piece of driftwood. I'm 80% sure it's the driftwood, and hope that biofilms
will begin to lock up the wood, but I can't say that for certain. I'll get
to this later once I've ironed out my environmental issues.
Those environmental things... Well, I seriously screwed up a month ago. I
broke every last danged rule I have about collection, and a bunch of animals
have paid for it. We had talked before about my "less than 60 degrees"
Shiner rule... If I bring home shiners from water under 60 degrees, I
haven't experienced problems. If I go a little bit above that, I may loose
those shiners, but no other problems for prexisting animals. If I bury my
brain in my butt for a day, and bring home a horde of redfin and golden
shiners from a muddy nasty ditch that is a cesspool of fish biomass (will
explain in another email) that's running, um, oh about 75 degrees... I'm
asking for it. And well, I got it.
Evil wee beastie that would rot a shiner in a matter of hours... One of the
previously healthy blackside darters... The crap ate through it's peritoneum
so that its guts were hanging out before it died. EVIL. The salt treatment
seemed to do a number on the tadpole madtoms (the infection went to other
systems through water contamination from feeding cups, and made me quit
living in denial) but it may stand to reason that the catfish were already
in trouble, the salt addition is a convenient anecdote for my ego. In any
case, a _lot_ of previously healthy fish went to Tank #13 (not to mention
nearly everyone who came home that day... Greensides and orangethroats did
the best).
So. I recant every last thing I've ever said about stress, multiplicity of
parasites from a stress source outside a system and how it can run over a
system, etc etc etc. I'll be quarantining from now on. Wether I am
currently using my head and past experience or not. It's just not worth it.
And since a q-tank can be set up so cheaply with the sand substrate as a
filter, it's too inexpensive to over look.
I've had the tank at a fairly high dose of salt... 2 heaping tablespoons per
5 gallons, or 40 heaping tablespoons total. I figure the 100 gallon is only
about 75 gallons water with all the substrate, so this would get it
somewhere towards what Mr. Z had suggested of 1% seawater. I think it came
to about 5 lbs of salt. Then I did an 80% waterchange, left them in the
more freshwater for about 4 hours, and back up we went. Osmoregulate that,
you little at !#$ at #$!!!
The good news is... The salt only phased the plants at first. There was a
noticible difference at first (like rhizomes stopped dead in their tracks)
but after a week of the same salinity, things took off like they had been
going. I was mostly concerned about the progression of the potamogeton, but
it's resumed waxing up the leaves it started after two weeks in the salt. I
expect to see a couple others begin over the weekend. In the future, I'd
like to have photo evidence of this, but man I got so much goin' on :)
So that's September 2004 in the aquaria world of Farmertodd. Some
collecting adventures to come later this evening, I hope, after I get the
tall coreopsis and gray headed coneflower seed away from those glutton
goldfinches! :)
Todd
----- Original Message -----
From: "Laura Burbage" <leuhrich at yahoo.com>
To: <nanfa-l at nanfa.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2004 2:43 PM
Subject: NANFA-L-- plants and soil
>
> Todd: how's your new soil plant tank going? If I'm
> at risk for blame, I wanna know the outcome!
>
> -Laura
>
>
>
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: Fri Dec 31 2004 - 11:27:23 CST