Aquascaping - The Home
A Natural Fertilizer Free of Charge
Written by Wednesday, 04 April 2001 01:00
I had the luck to be introduced into the hobby due to two good friends and long time aquarists. One of them is a Biologist-Icthyologist (Master of Aquaculture of Auburn University), while the other is a tropical fish enthusiast for more than twenty-five years. Both of them taught me not to be afraid of the natural solutions concerning fish keeping and aquascaping. These two people liked, and still do, planted aquaria. Those days, fertilizers and equipment made for underwater plantations were either expensive or difficult to find. So thinking and observing were the only allies in such attempts. So, we tried to set up our display tanks this way. We made a layer of oak leaves, which were collected from the topsoil of an oak forest near the place we lived at that time, and put a really thick layer of fine gravel over this soil. We then used Mercury Vapor lamps, a self made CO2 system, and that was all. And miraculously, it worked.
Nobody had seen such dense vegetation in an aquarium. No one had witnessed such blooming of aquatic plants before. The Rotalas got crazy, and conquered a vast territory in the tanks with their red foliage, Hygrofillas and Aponogeton species were blooming over the water surface, Cryptocorynes were growing faster than we could harvest them, and Lilaeopsis were making their green carpets all over the tanks. The fishes were happy, and we were even happier when Wardley’s foods had photos of our tanks on their first prospectuses, when they began distributing in our country.
Many plants were taken from these aquaria and loaded into our friends’ aquaria. Some of these mother plants are planted and still growing this very day. So what am I saying now is the same three words that Pavlos (one of the fishy partners) once said to some American hobbyists through the Internet when they were not able to understand how this success was achieved: SOIL-SOIL-SOIL.
The best thing you can do is either collect the topsoil from a clean side of a forest or buy commercial soil from a florist.Be cautious that this soil is not enhanced with Phosphates or Nitrates, and it is polyesterine foam free. Some fish are diggers, and these foam particles may separate and float on the surface, or they could be eaten by the fish, causing unknown problems in digestion. Polyesterine foam is put in these commercial soils to keep them moist. With natural oak forest topsoil, it is good to collect during autumn from places that are a bit distant from human activities, so that it is clean enough.
Some companies are importing tropical tree leaves, and with some searching, you could possibly find and use these instead of oak tree leaves. These leaves color the water with a tea like color that it is the natural color of tropical water estuaries. As a fertilizer we used, and still do, laterite, which is very easily found in our country making it unnecessary to buy it. The only thing we have to do is just go to the places that this mineral is excavated and collect it for free. We mix the laterite with water, and put it in the oven to harden. After that, we break it into pieces and place it under the soil layer.
When we had to reset a tank and were removing these layers, a foul odor of rotten organic substances (gases producing from decaying) would escape. I am not sure what exactly, but some anaerobic process takes place in there. This never caused a problem to our fishes and tanks, but seemed to, perhaps, work for the positive.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank publicly these two good friends, Pavlos Aslanis and Vasilis Vrodisis, for the way they made me think about aquaria and their hosts. Finally, I would like to suggest to you to give it a try yourselves.
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