Welcome to the beautiful world of aquascaping! The point of this video would be to show you, what happens after Day 1. We always make these tutorials about setting up a new tank, and showing you how it looks after two weeks. Now we're gonna actually make a journal for you on the first two months of this aquarium. So you're gonna see how the plants grow, you're gonna see how much algae we have after starting up. So please, join me on this journey! I'm gonna build a 60P aquarium now. I've actually prepared the hardscape this morning. I go back to Nature style. I'm gonna lay down a layer of Fuji stones in the front. And then build some Iron wood on top of it. Six pieces of wood, which we glued together, and that's why it was important that I tried to build the same base, so it can sit on it the same way. That's it for the hardscape! It was quick, wasn't it? Our maintenance guy is gonna hate me, there's basically no space in here to the glass and very little space in here. Now I'm gonna introduce the soil in the back. I'm gonna use ADA Amazonia Version 2. I'm not gonna use any fertilizing substrate underneath, because there's only gonna be a few stem plants. And with the new Amazonia Version 2 you get these fertilizing nutrient capsules. This amount is perfect if you plan to use it on the base of a full 60P aquarium. I'm gonna use small pieces of filter mesh, to prevent the soil from coming forward onto the sand area. Actually, I have to be honest. I didn't glue the wood pieces together. It was Lori helping me, so thank you Lori! As you may remember, I have some issues with glue. Falling has started. I'm gonna have a full-on red stem background behind the trees. As the first layer of plants, I'm gonna use the Anubias nana Bonsai, which is gonna go in between the rock and the wood pieces. We have a guest, there's a snail on the plant. When you look at a proper nature style tank, it doesn't have heavy hardscape pieces, like these two. And we're gonna make these look lighter by covering most of it with plants and ferns are the best for that. As the very last, I'm gonna use some Cryptocoryne parva. I'm gonna put these on the sides. So I don't have the reds in the reflections. I'm gonna put these in front of the reds on the very side of the aquarium. Small bits of Fuji stone, to add to the front, and a second layer of protection against the soil coming into the front. And that's it, we're done! Thank you for joining me and goodbye! I'm just kidding! Roll the intro! Okay, so it's Day 7 for this aquarium. It's been running for a week. We had to put some weighing stones on the wood, even though they've been glued together into one quite big and heavy piece. They still started to come up when we filled the aquarium. I'm perfectly happy actually! After one week, the tank is running extremely fine. Usually, we don't have this. We have at least some plants starting to melt. But there's no sign of that in here. Our routine for starting an aquarium is 50% water change every day, on the first week. So that basically ends today. This morning was the last of the daily water changes. What we make sure of when we do these water changes is that we remineralize the water and we fertilize the water. So we do all these from Day 1. Remineralizing is really important, to keep a stable pH in the aquarium. If you just pour it in and you're like: "Okay I'm gonna do a water change tomorrow as well, why bother with it?" You have to bother because Reverse Osmosis water has a very low pH for any kind of bacteria to start developing. So basically up to the point, you start remineralizing your water and keeping your pH above 5.8 - or something like that, you don't have any filtration and biological filtration. Most of you are familiar with these products. This is the GH Plus, which we've been using for remineralizing our aquariums for the past - I don't know - two years, or something like that. Now we came out with the GH/KH Plus. In most aquariums, you don't need this, you need only the GH Plus. But in a tank like this, where there is nothing in the aquarium that would raise KH, we use the GH/KH Plus because you need a little bit of KH, to keep pH stable in the tank. I know, a lot of letters just throwing around. We always say you only need to measure TDS. That's 95% true. In most tanks you don't need to worry about this. You don't need to worry about any of this, if you're using tap water. That's completely different. But if you're using RO water, and you don't have anything in your water that would raise the KH, you need a little bump with this one. The other thing is fertilization. We start fertilizing from Day 1. This has always been a tricky topic in aquascaping. A lot of people say that you only need to start fertilizing after one week, after two weeks, after three weeks. There're a lot of different opinions on that. What our experience shows, is that if you use in-vitro plants in your aquarium, you have to start fertilizing from Day 1. If you only use potted ones, you can start after one week or two weeks, because you have some fertilizers dissolving from the soil you use. So that's enough. The liquid or gel culture of the in-vitro plants is very, very rich in nutrients. So once you take the plant out of that environment, they'll still need a lot of nutrients. And that's why you have to start fertilizing from Day 1. In this aquarium - as in the whole showroom -, we fertilize with ADA. We use the Brighty K and the Mineral from the start and later on, we're gonna start adding the Brighty Iron. What ADA fertilization gives you is control over the plants. There are for example the Green Aqua Micro and Macro fertilizers. They give you very lush colors, very strong plants, but very, very quick growth. That's really good if you just want to enjoy one tank at home. But if you want to maintain twenty-something, - I don't even know how many tanks we have here -, then you want some kind of slower growth. And for that, ADA is perfect. A lot of you guys think that we do daily maintenance on these tanks and so on, we see these in the YouTube comments. We don't. We do the same weekly maintenance as we would do with a home aquarium. I've put some Rotala Vietnam Hra in the back, which is a really nice red plant. The really deep red colors only come out, if you use fertilization, that is low on Nitrates. And ADA is that kind. So it's Day 14 of this project. After two weeks we usually introduce the algae eaters. And we've done the same in this case. We added some Amano shrimp and Clithon snails - last evening, actually. Plants are still growing quite well, there is no melting at all, which is sometimes a problem even for us, but not in this case. Oh, a usual two-week-problem with any wood scape. There is a slight, slimy thing on the wood itself. It's perfectly normal, it's some kind of fungus. Whenever you introduce a new piece of wood into water, that's gonna grow. Sometimes a really thin, sometimes a really thick layer of fungus on the wood itself. It's like white jelly stuff. Perfectly normal, perfectly safe. You don't have to worry about it. Whenever you introduce the algae eaters, they're gonna gladly eat it. The other thing is; whenever you do the water changes, you can simply suck it off. If you have plants on the wood itself, just make sure that this slimy fungus thing doesn't cover the plants. Because that can kill the plants. But if it's just by its side, it's perfectly normal and perfectly safe. We had to clean the glass in- and outlets. Bacteria started to cover the inside of the filter hoses and the in- and outlets. On the second week, we do 50% water changes every other day. Now it comes to the easy part. Now we're gonna have the third week with only two water changes and from there on you're gonna have the once-a-week 50% water change. So it's gonna get simpler now. Rotala is growing quite well in the back. It doesn't have the red colors yet, the red plants don't really get red after a few weeks. They need a lot of time to get really deep red. Especially, if they are in-vitro like in this case with the Rotala Vietnam. Yeah, we're gonna have to wait about another 2, 3, 4, 5 weeks, to get the reddish color. And only after a few trims does it come out really strong, as you see in the other aquascapes in the Gallery. Oh, I have to remove the rocks. I'm gonna try to remove the rocks, let's put it that way. So it's just hoping for the best. Okay! The left side seems fine. Yeah, right side as well. So yeah, two weeks. It's Week 3 now, nothing major has happened. The only thing is we've introduced the fish, which is Daisy's ricefish in this instance. We don't use them enough, I think. They are really, really nice fish. And they are a perfect example of you going into a pet store, they look like nothing, they don't have colors and everything. But if you put them in a proper tank, in a few weeks' time, they get a beautiful deep blue tint with orange fins. They're really gonna look beautiful, so use this fish much more than you do now. We are at Week 5. ...and 6. Because we missed Week 5, we actually forgot to make new footage. But yeah, there's nothing special happening with the tank, it's actually running quite well. The only thing is we had some algae coming out on the wood, on the right side of the tank actually. There's nothing on the left side, but I can see some green spots, and some - maybe - BBA algae on the wood. It's perfectly normal. The tank is one month old. In the first two or three months, algae are coming and going. It's nothing to worry about. Older plants are still perfectly nice. We've covered the holes - which were missing -, with some Anubias Bonsai. Oh, the red is coming out in the backside. So the Rotala is coming strong. I think we are about one or two weeks away from the first trim. Finally, we've made it to 2021. We're still alive. Finally, we have some issues. I've been waiting for this since the start of the tank, to actually show you how to solve something, if it goes bad. The issue is from time to time, there is difficulty in getting algae eaters. Sometimes the Amano shrimp are missing from the market, sometimes the Otocinclus. Now we are missing the Amanos. And you can clearly see on the wood, that we would need them very much in this tank. So here come these tools. It's basically like a toothbrush. This is a metal wired brush, this can quite easily take off the algae from any wood or rock surfaces. It's really good at that. While it's not replacing the Amanos, well, they can help you when you can't source them anywhere. And I've heard that next week we're gonna finally receive some, so now I'm gonna remove all the algae that I can and then the Amanos are gonna take over in keeping the tank clean in the future. The other thing is - it's not an issue, it's a happy thing: Finally, the Rotala came up in the back. It's growing nicely and it's time for the first trim. I've had basically the same amount of Rotalas in the left and the right side. But somehow the wood is making some shadows on the right side to the back. In that part, the Rotala is a bit smaller than on the left side. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna trim the left side. Obviously, I'm gonna top some of it, so I'm gonna put back the top pieces. But I'm gonna save some for the right side, to make it richer and denser, before it actually grows out by itself. What we like to do here in the showroom... So that we don't have these ugly-cut tops, even for those few days. We replant the tops that we've saved. This way you can create a fake top with the nice, colored edges. So a new weapon, this is an ADA Pro Picker. It looks like a dentist tool, but it's really good for removing stuff like this. This is BBA, Black Brush Algae. It actually turned into this grayish-greenish color, which usually indicates that it's dying. The worst thing about BBA is that even when it's dead, it doesn't really disappear. This is the final log. We are actually two days away from the actual premiere of this video, so we are just on time. So yeah, this is the final look. This is how a tank looks like after a bit more than two months. This is how your tank should look like after two months. If you see more algae than this, you are doing something wrong. It was a really easy setup, we didn't have any of the issues we could have. Sometimes the power goes out and then we lose all the bacteria in our filters. Sometimes the CO2 canister goes empty and we don't notice in time. Algae again. You can have the timer going bad for the light, and you have the light on for the night or for a weekend, when you go away, or something like that. Things like this... These always happen to us. And not this time, when we could actually show you. So you have to imagine all this, or I'm sure that some of you have already been through all this. Basically what you need to do in these cases is get rid of all the algae physically. Whatever you can, just scrape it off. Wash the plants, make sure that you put in more bacteria. So something like Seachem Stability, or Prodibio Bio Digest, Bio Trace. This stuff, so the tank can get better. Quicker, than if you just leave it be. Also in these cases, if you have any big algae problems, more frequent water changes, that's always a good option. Just make sure that you keep your fertilizers at level. Always have to re-fertilize after big water changes or very frequent water changes. There is a bit of a lie in this video. Wherever you saw me doing water changes and putting in fish and everything, it wasn't me. So obviously we have a huge staff here, to do that. I've done the plant trimming myself. And scraping the algae off the wood. Obviously, at home, you have to deal with all this alone. But I think that's the fun and that's the beauty of this hobby. If you just have about 20-30 minutes work for every week, which is reasonable for a 60P even with problems, then that's your 30 minutes for that week to shut the world off completely and just enjoy aquascaping, that's what it's all about. See you next week! Bye! Since we've been doing this for nine weeks, I'm not sure if I've already said this. So please subscribe, join our membership and like this video, as always. [Narrator] Next week on Green Aqua. Tommy, the hero of Iwagumi sets up a beginner nano tank. Join us for the birth of a 20 liter (5 gallons) mini Rocky Mountain landscape.
