Despite the common misconception, setting up your aquarium with minimal foliage is not enough for your tank’s ecosystem to thrive! One must delve deep into the knowledge of picking out specific plants, attain the optimal fertilizer, and also choose a nice type of scenery for the whole system. Not only will your fish have a wild-life feel, but you’ll know you’ve done the best for them (also they’re great to look at)!
Carpeting:
One of the essential bits of creating a healthy foliage, is ensuring that your tank has a healthy and clean carpet. This involves having a healthy layer of dirt filled with plants and the essentials for their survival:
- Carbon DiOxide (CO2)
- Light
- Fertilizers
Ensuring these are present within the carpeting system will allow your plants to thrive, and will forward to the survival of your fish!
Find out more about carpeting also on the quintessential buyers guide, if you’re looking for more and more details!
How to Plant for Carpeting?
Basically, you’ll want to have the plants be placed in a grid formation. With this pattern, you’ll allow for there to be space in between each of the sections. This is vital, as plants compete for resources in order to survive (light, CO2, nutrients). So, the more efficient your grid formation is, the better your carpet will be!
Continuation:
Once you’ve laid out the whole foundation, you’ll want to ensure that the whole system keeps working itself out. There’s a very likely possibility of changes that might be needed in terms of reef lighting /or water conditions. Routine checkups will be in order.
Accelerants:
Just like with most plants outside water, these can be also be helped for optimal growth with additives. These are accelerants that help your carpet (plants) to grow faster, but ensure that they’ll also be healthy. You can do without it, but if you want it done faster, now you know how!
Trimming:
Just like your back garden, once they’ve grown, the plants will start to take over your tank, and over time you’re going to have to carefully snip out the extra bits of foliage. To ensure optimal levels in your tank, it is advised you maintain this every 10 days, otherwise your plants are going to start suffering from a lack of resources.
Creating a carpeting can be difficult at first, but with proper instructions and adherence to them, you can be sure to get a great outcome!
Aquascaping:
Now that we have already delved into the idea of making a carpet system for your tank, let’s look into the concept of aquascaping. The name doesn’t really hold value, but no matter what, when you’re creating a world for your fish, you’ll want it to be beautiful. And in this case, your imagination can run wild in the tank!
There’s numerous aesthetic ways of creating your perfect aquarium, but let’s delve into 5 traditional types of aquascaping.
- Nature Aquarium: Created with having taken inspiration from Japanese gardens, this type of aquarium will give your ecosystem a complete sense of harmony. Going off of it’s name, it’s meant to symbolize the idea of having been created by nature. With this style, you’ll be incorporating numerous types of gravel and plants to make a perfect mesh.
- Dutch Aquarium: Originating from Holland, and taking inspiration from their flower lands, this style of aquarium is meant to have a contrast in colors made by the different formation of flower areas. With only a central carpeting system, there is no use of stones or wood in this type of aquarium.
- Iwagumi Aquarium: The most popular style for aquascaping, and for a very good reason. Iwagumi translates to ‘rock formation’, and as such uses a variety of rocks (usually 7) to create a sense of tranquility within the ecosystem. As such, very few plants are used in this type of aquascape and small fish usually roam them.
- Jungle Aquarium: From the name you can gather that not much trimming is necessary in this form of aquascape! Plants usually grow up till the water surface, and it allows for a range of ideas to be implemented, usually to your whim. There are usually a few clear areas within the jungle, with thick foliage in the rest. You’ll get the idea of a mystical forest in the tropics, left to mystery.
- Saltwater Aquariums: These aquariums usually encase formations of rocks, filled with fish or corals. You can set it up to have just reefs or fish or both, and it leaves you with copious amounts of choices, in terms of what to do with the tank. However, considering their expenses, the cost on these aquariums can range from low to high and varying on the cost of maintaining the tank.
Once you’ve chosen your aquascaping style, you can get towards making your own beautiful aquarium. However, don’t feel like you’re stuck to these options, with proper knowledge and ideas, you can make your very own type of aquarium!
Be sure to keep in mind how to properly carpet, and ensure your plants have the optimal chances of growth along with proper maintenance!
