Paludarium update photos… with cat for scale… it’s...

Paludarium update photos… with cat for scale… it’s finished, basically, but the plants are still scraggly and no critters yet aside from accidental ones, snails and assorted water bugs. Still cycling. also, the water is still a bit brown from tannins, but oh man, it’s nothing compared to a week ago, hah, you could barely see anything in there, it was like I’d filled it with tea.

It remains very difficult to photograph, and I obviously suck at cleaning glass. The crypts and Pogostemon suffered some melting, but they are both showing signs of new growth so they ought to recover, and with crypts, that’s just something you have to expect anyway. You can see some yellow crypt leaves in the tank, I’m leaving them there for now to provide ammonia for cycling. I experienced some fungus on the wood, again fairly common, but the beforementioned accidental critters seem to be making short work of it now, and I think the moss is beginning to attach itself. The Anubias was , once i got it out of it’s pot, a tiny little bit of rhizome so i was hard to tie on in a pleasing way, but hopefully with time it will correct itself.  The soil in the pot is damper than I expected, but the plants seem happy, aside from one which could not handle it an I had to remove, so the back corner is empty. If it turns out some more can’t handle it I may actually just take some crypts and plant them in there, it may just be damp enough for them. I have some Creeping Jenny in there, which can actually be used as an underwater plant, so it ought to be fine at the very least. So it’s a bit scraggly right now after the melt and the terrestrial plants just getting started (and the African Violet suffered a lot of broken leaves)

Give it a couple weeks and I should be ready to add the first (intentional) critters. I’m of two minds on them. A pair of Dwarf African Frogs and a handful of cherry shrimp are a given, this is a great tank for frogs because the water is shallow and there is plenty of cover for both them and the shrimp, so it’s good for them. After that, I can’t decide between 2-3 Croaking Goramis (they make noise! singing fish!) OR a Betta (purple, to match the flowers, and I am hoping for a halfmoon) plus one or two Bumblebee Gobies. I will have to think on it.

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Paludarium uptate - there is some bad news. I used the wrong...

Paludarium uptate - there is some bad news. I used the wrong silicone, (GE Silicone 2 Door and Window) and while there was some conflicting info, some said it was safe, others had all their fish die, and I erred on the side of caution because i did not want to risk killing everything in there and ripped out every bit of silicone and started over, using a combo of SCS1200 Construction, and Marineland’s aquarium silicone. Luckily, the silicone peeled off the foam with ease, so I did not have to redo the foam (though I did touch up the ‘waterfall’ area to make spillover less likely) other parts were harder…. On the plus side, it did give me the opportunity to cut out the bottom of the pot and move it up, so the heater should fit in the hidden compartment now, I also sucked in the sides with some nylon ties so it fits a bit better in the tank. So not all bad.

I also decided to give the silicone more time to cure this time  just to be extra safe, even though the two types I got actually have very fast cure times. So the last couple days it’s just been sitting there. Doing nothing.  So  in the meantime, I tackled the hood problem. This is a tank kit, and it came with a fitted hood. But it is a paludarium and the plants will go above the top of the tank, I needed more room.  I think I have come up with an idea that will in the end result in an almost invisible means of support. I know it looks awful now, but that’s because I made the prototype out of a leftover plastic cardboard political sign. (I will likely at least paint it black, cus wow, orange, blue and white supports are ugly)  The final version will be made out of plexiglass. It requires some intricate and very precise cutting, but luckily a friend of mine ordered a Glowforge, and he will cut the pieces for me when he gets it. :D  So in the meantime, this is ugly, but functional and reasonably sturdy considering it’s made out of plastic cardboard and held together with clamps. Gives the plants in the terrestrial part room to grow, and maybe even in the aquatic part, if i get some dwarf umbrella palms or something.  (that will likely have to wait till spring, this is Canada, they stop selling pond plants at this time of year) I also taped a piece of black construction paper over one edge so the light doesn’t shine  right in the corner of my eye while at the computer. That’d be annoying. I also added a clip on lamp. As far as I can tell, the lighting on this hood isn’t bad, it’s got some decent LED’s, but it’s not great, either. But I did mostly pick easy plants, anubias, crypts, bacopa, salvinia, spiky moss, but… the store did have some Hemianthus callitrichodies ‘cuba’ and I had to get it, I would really love to get a carpet going, it also had some Pogostemon which just looked so cool, but it’s doing fantastic in the jumbled plant bucket, so i think i will be fine with it.  Also the colour of the LEDs is a bit blue for my tastes, and the lamp softens that with a bit of yellowish light. I may not need the lamp but eh, I have it  anyway, and it was doing a pretty good job of keeping the plants in the bowls alive during the winter months when they didn’t get much sun at all.

So yeah. though I have been working hard on this project, it is pretty much just back to the same place it was before, except for the hood.

ps. sorry but this thing REALLY does not photograph well with all the stuff on my desk reflecting in the glass. I may have to invest in some black cloth to drape over everything to take a decent photo of this thing. Looks great in person, honest.

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The hard work is done, the paludarium is assembled, (though...

The hard work is done, the paludarium is assembled, (though there is one other piece of driftwood that goes in there, but the plate is in it’s place for now) and the upper part is planted. (though the plants are a bit ragged, they should recover though) Turns out, it holds about 7 gallons. not a lot, but it’s fine for some shrimp, a couple Dwarf African Frogs, and a Betta.  And astonishingly, a snail has ALREADY found it’s way in there. He’s crawling along the glass right now. He must have hitched a ride on the driftwood with the moss, that was on the old bowl. Just need to add the aquatic plants now, but I need a bit more aquarium gravel first, and a couple water changes to minimize the tannins from the soil before i add the plants. will get that done tomorrow.

The filter was causing be nothing but grief today. first it was taking on air, so  i had to seal the hose with silicone, then the output was being finicky and it is now a bizarre mishmash of bits of plastic to get it flowing to the right place, but i think it’s working now. Sadly, the heater did not fit in the hidden compartment like i wanted, so i will have to find a place for it in the tank itself, looking all ugly and unnatural :-/ That, or i get a smaller heater and save this one for something else.

I need to also figure out a way to raise the hood up by about 5 inches, but for now I can prop it up on a clamp at the one end, I can figure out the hood situation a bit later.

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ok, i know the pics are crap, but I am pleased with the results...

ok, i know the pics are crap, but I am pleased with the results of my mud tower. I will get my actual camera’s batteries charged for tomorrow, and move some things on my desk out of the way. This is where the paludarium stands at the end of the day. I admit i had my doubts in the early stages, but silicone  and dirt finish for the TOTALLY WORKED, and it looks very natural looking, I think. I think I am going to try and raise the bottom of the planter up so i have more room for water, it should also help make it look more like the bank of a pond, which is what i am going for, and make it easier for moss to grow. I still need to leave enough room for the roots of the plants, but the pot now is fairly deep, it should not be an issue. Put it in the tank to make sure everything fit (it did!) and make sure the filter hole could be easily hidden with rocks (it can!) so it will be a very natural looking tank with no visible hardware aside from the actual body of the filter. awesome! Oh, and also, I did remove most of the rim, but I still have one chunk that’s being stubborn then a lot of leftover silicone to scrape off. But it will look so much nicer with no rim.

though I am creating a MASSIVE mess to clean up later :p

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Paludarium update. Got the aquarium, and ended up going a bit...

Paludarium update. Got the aquarium, and ended up going a bit larger than initially planned, I ended up with a 16 gallon (though I dunno, it seems a bit bigger) bowfront. I am going to look into removing the black rim on top but if i can’t do that safely no big deal. but I will need to jury rig something with the hood, hack it up so that it can float about a foot above. Began work on the hardscape, beginning with blocking out the shape with expanding foam.  I know it looks craptastic now but I think I’ve just about got the right shape going, though I am gonna be sweeping up foam chips from carving it away for months to come, I’m sure.  I carved out a little creek feature and partway down is a larger cavity where i can plant some small crypts and such growing emersed. I am now ready to slather it with silicone and dirt, rocks, woodchips (which will hopefully get some moss growing on them) etc. to make it look natural, and then I can actually begin assembling and planting the whole thing.

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So, I mentioned a while back a plan to build a huge...

So, I mentioned a while back a plan to build a huge paludarium… that never happened, at least not yet. Turns out i am going to be moving in a year or so, so setting up a massive tank like that right now would be very poor timing. Instead what i have decided to do is to do a small scale version of it. 10 gallons, at the end of my computer desk. You can see the supplies i have in the location the tank will be occupying and a craptastic 5 minute sketch of the plan. I have the gravel and potting soil, I have some of the plants in that bowl I set up (which got knocked over recently, so I need to tear it down anyway, and is part of what made me want to do this small pludarium, since though it looks like crap because everything got shaken around, the plants are ok) I have some driftwood, (also in the bowl) and I have this plastic oval pot left over from gardening this year. I checked and it’s Polypropylene which should be aquarium safe. So. the plan is, cut it in half, stack the resulting halves on top of each other with them siliconed to the tank, so it forms  a base on the bottom, and a pot on top, which i can then run some nylon rope into  the bottom half to wick water up from the tank to water the terrestrial plants. there will be a hole, about 2 inches across, in the lower half with a pipe  siliconed into it, stuffed with a fitting foam insert to handle the mechanical filtration, some bio beads in the lower half of the stacked pots will handle the bio filtration, (not that it will need a lot, but hey, do it right) while a pump (possibly just a HOB filter, which I will end up putting plants in if i end up with an aquarium kit) intake is fed into the lower half, pulling it through the pipe with the foam insert, and pumping the water into a  mini creek/waterfall on the terrestrial part (made waterproof of course, so it can flow back into the tank). I may have to build up the ‘bank’ around the pot up top with expanding foam. or glued together wood, or… I’ll mess with it, see what works.  It’s  the exact same plan as i had for the larger paludarium, just a whole lot smaller and slightly different shape. I’m thinking of this as a proof of concept. Since this tank will be viewable from both sides, having this oval shape in the middle works well for this, I’m thinking it could be quite pretty assuming I do a good job of covering up the pot with rocks/wood/foam.

i will be getting the tank on friday, so this one is definitely going ahead. Once it is set up and settled in, I will stock it with some freshwater shrimp (probably Cherry Shrimp, maybe Bumblebee) and a couple Dwarf African Frogs, MAYBE a Betta, we’ll see how much water area i end up with before deciding for sure on that.

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