Saturday, June 10, 2017

How not to fail with Monte Carlo and Dwarf Baby Tears





How not to fail with Monte Carlo and Dwarf Baby Tears

As you can see the Micranthemum Monte Carlo and Heminathus callitrichoides Dwarf Baby Tears is growing just fine under my homemade LED lighting pendent; slow but not dyeing and full of alga.  The Monte Carlo is said to be a very easy to grow plant but if you read the plant forums it is far from easy to grow and keeps dyeing on hobbyist and the Dwarf Baby Tears is considered to be a very hard to grow plant, needing lots of strong light and fertilizers. 
However, in this SCA aquarium using the 6500K and 5000K Bright Stiks (NOTE: almost any LED bulb that 5000k will do.) lighting system that I talk about in my video on how to make for a fraction of the cost of a Amazon Sun Kessel pendent lighting system. Both plants after going through a four-month acclimation period are now starting to grow and prosper just fine.
I’m a believer that less is more when it comes to aquatic plants. What I mean is:
Stay away from substrate fertilizers and only add drops of liquid Iron and
Potassium to the system on a daily basis. Anytime you add fertilizer tabs or
any add Nitrogen in any form to the substrate you risk eutrophication in the
substrate that will then migrate, through percolation, osmoses, convection or it
can even leach through the substrate by diffusion of nutrient into the
waterbody. The outcome will be a eutrophic aquarium that in a natural system
takes hundreds of years to create and you will have done it in just a few
weeks.

Fertilizers in the form of Nitrogen are the worst to add to any aquarium so don’t be
hoodwinked into doing it just because some proclaimed expert tells you to.
Plants are looking for the Ammonium ion and not the Nitrogen ion as some would
like you to believe. In fact, some plants have not learned how to utilize
nitrogen and store it in their cells and begin to rot because Nitrogen must be
converted back into ammonia in a twostep reduction proses that takes energy and
work to do so by the plant. Plants take ammonia 24 hrs a day 7 days a week but
will only take Nitrogen during photosynthesis and not at night when the plant
shuts down its reduction process.

Substrates,  if set up correctly will bring nutrients through it by diffusion and/or convection to the plant roots without human intervention. Doing so will prevent the on slot of cyanobacteria and unwanted Algae.

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