One of the great joys of keeping an aquarium is creating natural looking environments for our fish. Once you get a glimpse of some of the gorgeous planted aquariums online, the urge to go with a planted tank is overwhelming. Unfortunately, unless you have someone knowledgeable holding your hand, the major pet store chains are your guide. That spells out trouble as their staff’s aquatic plant knowledge is normally at zero, and their product labeling is confusing.

Both PETCO and PetSmart carry a line of plants in plastic tubes that are labeled under a sign that notes they are for terrariums and aquariums. While that sign is technically true, I would say only 15% of the plants are actually meant to be in an aquarium. The rest of the plants are not meant to be submersed completely in water. What happens you submerse them? Nothing at first, as the plants are grown in such a way that makes each generation more resistant to being underwater. That still doesn’t make them aquatic plants. They will not thrive underwater, and eventually these plants will rot away.

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I’m finally settled into the new home. The plants took a beating in the move, but they’re slowly coming back up. I never put the Moai statues back into the tank. I wanted to go with a more natural look, so I added some more natural scape pieces.

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Posting hasn’t been on my mind lately. Escrow closed on the new home about a month ago, but I’m still not in the new home yet. I knew it would take some time, even just to move the fish tanks, even though the new home is only fifteen minutes away.

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With the upcoming move pending, I have let my tank go into a stand still. I have been preoccupied with signing paperwork for the new home. It’s ridiculous how many stacks of paper have to be signed. There are clauses for radon, asbestos, termites, earthquakes, mudslides, and I think I saw one in there about Godzilla attacks. I digress. I haven’t purchased the rest of the plants I wanted to fill in the areas that need some planting, because I figure I’m going to have to pull them up and replant them later. My dosing schedule for fertilizers has gone out the window as well. Still, my plants seem to be growing decently, which exposes another problem for me. I haven’t trimmed my plants in a while.

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We have all seen tanks overrun with algae and have probably all dealt with it ourselves. How do you get rid of the blasted stuff? Let’s start by getting one thing straight. You can’t get rid of algae. The fact of the matter is, algae is always present. Whether it is present in quantities that are noticeable is a completely different story.

Algae can look very good in a tank and give it a more natural look. I have some stones in my tank that have grown a fair amount of algae on them. I think the stones look much better with this growth. It adds more color to the tank than would exist in an algae free environment.

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This is the story about how I got into fish keeping. This was no more than a year and a half ago.

You can see two goldfish in a tiny container. In the background you can see the bright red colors of a carnival booth with different colored bowls of water. You all know the game. The object is to toss ping pong balls into these bowls to win goldfish as a prize. Well I won two little goldfish that I knew nothing about. I left them with my girlfriend, who knew just as little about fish as I did.

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I did a water change and was dosing my liquid fertilizers and carbon supplement when my plants started pearling. That’s nothing out of the ordinary, but there was one stem plant that had its top cropped of during one of my trimmings. It had bubbles pouring out of it at an incredible rate. I have a picture and a very short clip of this.

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I took a few video clips on my camera and spliced them together so you can see some of my tank occupants. A lot of the clips are during feeding time, which is why the fish are so overly excited.

I was reading through one of the forums I frequent and stumbled across an old post, where one of the members posted a picture of a tank he worked on for a client. My jaw dropped when I saw this aquarium. This tank is the work of Tom Barr, also known as plantbrain in many of the forums. I  believe all the photos are his as well. I don’t know much about Tom other than he is well respected for his aquarium work, and he apparently does this for a living. Add me to the list of those that admire his work.

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