This Aquascape Didn’t Go Exactly as Planned…

Hello everyone, last week you got a 60p from Balazs and now it's my turn. It's behind me, you can't see it right now. There are a few new things I tried in this tank. There's a new plant I was quite excited about and we also have a new light. And something else new, Tommy, our maintenance expert, went on holiday the day I built this one. So at the end of the video you're going to see what can go wrong if maintenance is not perfect in the beginning. That's what we're going to talk about today. lately which is now a long time i've been obsessed with proper nature aquariums even within that grass type plants even when i wasn't building an iwagumi i was reaching for eleocharis types and so on today strictly no grass types but still NA style so let's see what i can do in 60p Old school NA style, there's no sand. I'm actually gonna cover the whole bottom of the tank. I'm gonna start out by the substrate layer as usual, which today is gonna be ADA Power Sand Advance. This is exactly designed for a 60P, just one bag. Get it all around the tank. Gonna clean up the front shortly. Still feel Homasan's eyes on the back of my neck when I'm doing this. In the front, I leave a few centimeters off so I don't see the two layers when I look at the tank from the front. On the sides, you can pull the sides as well to have the same gap as you have in the front. The reason I don't do it here is because obviously we are using a gallery to show our customers how the tanks are built. And this way, we can show them from the sides that there are two layers of soil. For the soil, I'm going with ADA Amazonia, just like with the PowerSand, one bag is usually perfect for a 60p. This is not a straight up, as I just said, because of course, if you want big elevations, you're gonna need more special time. I don't forget about the Amazonia supplements. These are the capsules that come within the bag that you can add more nutrients with. It's not mandatory to add the whole bag, but today I'm gonna use a lot of stem plants, which are gonna take up lots of nutrients from the substrate. I've started from the front, because if I were to pour this onto the PowerSand, it would actually push the PowerSand, and all the work I put in to cleaning the front, I would have lost that. Once you have this first layer covering, it can't push the substrate anymore, so you don't have to be that careful. This is perfectly enough to start the hardscape, and then I'm gonna work my way up later on. Now, again, I'm gonna try to make it as nice as possible, which I've never seen the point of. I never understood this. I get the philosophy that this is your frame where you can start painting, basically, but all this is gonna move about as soon as I start placing hardscape pieces in it. Today, I'm going to use Hakai stone and iron wood. Hakai stone is usually used for Iwagumi layouts where the stone speaks for itself and there's nothing hiding it. This one, they are just going to be supporting pieces and the iron wood is going to be the main character of the scape. I don't want that piece of wood to just float in nothing. So that's why I'm using the stones underneath. that's gonna create the base. What I need is this triangular sort of shape so the wood can sit on top of it and create that natural flow. Piece of wood that creates the start of my arch is gonna be this one. This is not the piece that's gonna create the arch, so I'm closing this gap on purpose. I don't really care about all the person coming out because I'm gonna add another layer of soil on top. And then this one is going to create the actual arch. And these two pieces work really nicely together. And this way, I have the arch that I've mentioned. I'm actually really happy about how it looks now. We can actually fix this in position. Okay, so the two pieces are now connected. And this side, the stone is going to be even more visible. This is an even nicer piece or more textured. should. This is not safe at all and this was prepared by Aaron from our YouTube team. So if you're a gold or diamond member you get monthly blooper reels. So if I were to flip this whole thing now then you might see this tray flying across the gallery early next month. Now two things for the purpose of this. First of all I need it to continue the wave. I don't just want the wave to go to the bottom it doesn't come up so this shape and this shape is basically the same the other thing this is following the top of the rock underneath do we have cable ties on hand to make sure that this stands and i want it to let's glue then i'm going to remove the cable ties i've actually planned to use and ordered quite a few different types of rotalas for this build because because we want to use the different color ranges available within Rotala's, which today are insane. And I actually have a new light to do all this, but we're gonna talk about it at the end of the video. Okay, so that should be enough glue to hold this whole thing. And did I make a mess of this tray while doing it? Only gonna find out from the blooper reels. So back to the Amazonia. much easier to roll some soil from the back to the front without making a mess than the other way around because you want to keep the front as thin as possible so much better to fill from the back at this stage fill from the back and roll forward whatever you need now you see as i'm pouring soil here it naturally rolls forward front is sort of even for actual top planting i have a few small pieces of hakas stones that i still want to place and then we get into the plants we can start as usual with the carpet which today is going to be monte carlo i just found out that Bajd did another 60p a week ago but he used monte carlo as well so he's talked a lot about it so now I want. It's Monte Carlo, that's it. Now it's not too often that Balazs and I build the same size right after each other, so this is the perfect chance you guys let us know which one is better. Obviously these are two completely different styled tanks, but the carpet is the same so you can like rate which one of us planted better, the carpet. What I'm going to do now is add a bit of extra soil here in the middle because i'm gonna run the Monte Carlo carpet all to the back of the glass but i wanted to have a slight elevation when you look through this arch you see that slight hill going towards the back okay so we have the carpet done what i have in here is the storage and reprints that's going to be my mid-ground planting to get the transition from the carpet to the stems then as for epiphytes i was trying to go for a bit more tricky ratios so i went with small plants the Anubias mini coin the bucephalandra mini needle leaf cryptocoryne parva and the cryptocoryne albida brown and something i've been dying to try Microsorum pteropus narrow which is obviously not a new plant but it's new in in vitro form this is a very very slow plant so my hope is this is going to stay very small for a very long time a narrow grows about this long the leaves normally but that takes months so i can use it in here as a small fern style plant obviously i have many years of experience and i know how these plants gonna look after some time especially when we're gonna get to the rotellas which are famous for changing their leaves so much underwater compared to how they look when they come fresh from the nursery if you're new to the hobby this is something a bit difficult i guess this is what we see customers suffering with quite a bit they choose the plants by the looks they see when they get to the shop and that's usually the nursery form the immersed form of the plant and then it's well it's not the best feeling when the plant doesn't actually look like that in a few months time what i recommend first of all for example in the webshop now we have immersed and submerged form of the plant pictured for most of the plants not all of them but most of them you can see how they look underwater and also you go through our videos, you see the build videos, you always have a final look at the end and we do follow-ups on the tanks, not one by one, but we do gallery tours where we see the tanks after many months with these videos you can actually see how a certain plant is going to look, the reason I'm saying this, this is a Cryptocoryne albida brown, now this is mainly roots and a few leaves that have nothing to do with how the plant is going to look underwater and also if you're new and you order a plant and this is what you get this is perfectly normal this plant is gonna turn into something beautiful, you just have to wait it out, one thing I always tell about this this plant you plant it you give it two or three weeks and you're gonna see these top shoots starting to grow, at that point you have to make a decision if you just let it grow the plant is gonna get sort of high and not that dense, if you trim that very top shoot back you're you're gonna get a much bushier plant with much more dense growth. I think that's a neat trick. From time to time, it's gonna start to grow one or two shoots out. You just trim those back. Professional planting techniques seen here. Sometimes you need to be creative. And this is not a too demanding plant, so we might have some shadows here. Not too much, to be honest, because there's a huge gap in the wood in here. But even if it was in a lot of shadows, it would be fine. We always say that even though different suppliers have the same plant names, sometimes the plant itself is not the same. This is the case with the Cryptocoryne parva. You can get it as potted or in vitro from Tropica. They both gonna be bigger than this. This is the Green Aqua version and this stays like this small. So small things you experience along the way. So now let's move on to the Cryptocoryne albida red, which I just want to use smaller accents all around. Don't want it to be too obvious. So that's it for the Cryptocorynes. I have the carpet, I have the bushes. All that's left for planting is the stem plants. And before that, I'm gonna dress up the hardscape. I'm gonna go with the epiphyte plants now. I want to keep lots of the hardscape visible. I want to keep the arch itself, the line to be visible, but I want to get rid of all the bulky bits. And for that, in vitro Microzorum is gonna be perfect because I just take this, bloop, it's done. I'm gonna make all this green here on the top. This here is gonna be just a big batch of Microsorum narrow, hopefully quite small for a long time. I'm gonna pop some Anubias Mini coin right next to it. This one we're gonna need to glue. Gonna have some more Microsorum and some Riccardia, which I didn't clean any, because I want to get rid of all these big barky patches. I just want the line itself to be visible, but I want to cover most of the wood. Make it a bit more varied. I'm gonna use special, crazy, the Micro Microsorum. I'm sure it's gonna look insanely good in the beginning it's definitely gonna grow out the tank eventually I just don't know how much time I have in between so this is gonna be the test and after testing this will be heavily used in contest aquascapes I'm sure of that by me, by ourselves here at Green Aqua and by lots of people around the world because this just opens new doors I never planted wood this dense and it just looks cool. This is a good aspect of me not building the tank for about two months. I actually have patience now for this. I think in most cases I wouldn't have done most of this. A bunch of different Rotalas I have here. They all look slightly different from each other. Some of them look the very same but they're different plants and they all gonna look this slightly different under water. The leaf shape is gonna be a bit different the color is going to be a bit different this is i believe Rotala Laos which looks insanely cool now in immersed form it's going to look much more like any other Rotala underwater actually i would be really happy if we would have a plant that looks like this underwater it sadly doesn't work like that i'm going to sort of mix them still going to have lines coming from front to back with differences but I'm gonna do mix as well so just have to make sure that I use all types everywhere, not that it matters too much if you plant this many plants even in such, let's be honest, quite small tank a 60p always go in order of size of the plant, but if you plant a big one that's gonna lay on the ground and you don't know where you have the empty spots for the shorter ones so the build is done the batteries are running out from the cameras so this is where we're gonna end now and in a few seconds you're gonna see how it looks in a few weeks' time was it quick enough? We still have batteries, see in a bit, so here we are about a month later as usual and first things first, during the build I mentioned that I'm gonna be curious if you like this more or Balaji's build which you've seen a week before mine, 60p versus 60p, I was quite confident then not that confident anymore, so yeah I'm really curious which one you like more, but this tank it needs a bit of time especially the background so like the stem plants in the back they need lots of trimming to get more dense and then come up again and get more color during that process now besides the stem plants the main issue is going around the carpet, the Monte Carlo it doesn't look too nice at the moment, what you can't see on the video but we see by looking at it every day is it's actually bouncing back right now so there are still a lot of pieces that are basically just dying off at the moment but we see lots of new growths here in just a few days this is gonna look much nicer but we have to do the b-rolls today so you guys get the video on time and so on believe me it's gonna look better shortly but my biggest excitement about this project was the micro Zollumin in vitro obviously for that we discussed this again during the video that I'm I'm curious how they're going to look in about six months, how slow they're going to be. Can you use this type of plant for miniature effects on a big layout in the long run or not? After a month, they barely grew anything, so that's a good sign on what I need them for, but we're going to see this later on how this changes. As for the current state of the tank, a bit of additional information which I believe can be something you can learn from a lot of people say that all our tanks looks like look like this because we do daily maintenance on all of them and so on that's not true we have one person Pami you've seen her many times on the videos she's doing the maintenance in the gallery every tank has a weekly routine so she does the same thing that we recommend you to do at home there's no extra work but when this tank was started Pami was on holiday so i've installed this in the middle of no man's land the whole of Green Aqua was like oh i have a bit of free time i'm gonna maintain one of the tanks obviously that's quite visible right now what you can learn from this this tank shows really well how important the first few weeks are maintenance-wise and i'm just talking about doing the water changes as we recommend and just checking on your tank daily to see how it goes and see if anything needs adjustment we have some fish in there don't know what kind of fish i just like when i spotted them was like i like that i need that but they are quite shy so you don't see them now you're gonna see them on the b-rolls hopefully also we have some Ramirezi cichlids, which I like a lot and we don't really use them, so I think it's a nice addition for this specific layout. And of course, we have a new light. This is the TwinStar 600S Pro light. Few things about this. First of all, it has very natural colors. These days, I highly prefer natural colors over stunning colors, if this makes sense. There are a lot of lights out there that give you really mind-blowing looks, but they're sort of fake. Obviously, this is up to personal preference. These days, I'm more for the natural colors, and this light is perfect for that. So obviously, this light knows what every other light knows these days, doing sunsets, sunrise. You can play around with the color channels one by one. In addition, first of all, it's not just RGB. It actually has six different kind of colors. If you look at it, you can actually visibly see that there are some yellow ones and blue ones in there, a different type of blue ones and all sorts of things. This is to provide a very wide range of spectrum for what the plants need to grow. And also, what I think is a very nice idea, and I haven't seen this before with any other light, they're calling it Light Planner, I think, which is the first 25 days of the tank, you can start this process and it will acclimate your plants. Some people do this manually, that they increase the light intensity slowly during the first month. But this light does it for you automatically. So I think that's a nice touch. If you're not sure which tank I was talking about by Balazs 60p and the comparison and you guys letting me know which one you like more, if you haven't seen that, here is a video of that. There is the video, there? No, there, there? What? There, there? Okay, so out of four, the last one. So here is the video about that build. You can check it out.