Planted tanks, DIY PMDD fertilizer & more...

[manytanks]

What do you do when you have a serious head cold, hacking cough, sinus congestion - and can't sleep? You research aquarium topics, of course. And share the results with fellow OVASians.

Here are two excellent URLs for fertilization of planted tanks. The first one is a plain language overview; the second gets a bit, ah... 'pharmaceutical' but is understandable by anyone who's reached this point in searching to develop a work-around for the (outrageously) high prices of liquid fertilizer for aquariums.

Introduction to Fertilizers for a Planted Tank (Macronutrients and Micronutrients)
=> http://www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua/art_plant_fertilizer_intro.htm

Practical PMDD (Poor Man's Dosing Drops) Information - Sources and Doses
=> http://www.thekrib.com/Plants/Fertilizer/pmdd-tim.html

And finally an excellent series of articles on aquatic horticulture by Karen Randall:
=> http://www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua/aqfrontiers.htm

Happy reading.

[Aiglos]

Those articles were a bit technical I found, Maybe just because i've never dealt with live plants but im very interested now, thanks for the articles, interesting will have to read more about it,

[BigDaddy]

Chuck Gadd's site is very popular with people starting out with planted tanks.  He has lots of good information to get people started.

And frankly, his CO2 chart and calculator is probably the one most people use.

[Anubias]

These are o.k. sources of information concerning PMDD. However, the amount of potassium sulfate in the Sears-Conlin mix is too high unless the lighting over the tank and the CO2 input is relatively low, and plant growth is subsequently limited. I add about half of what I used to add since reading Tom Barr'is comments and observations. Due to his high growth strategy, he doesn't add K2SO4 at all, just KNO3. In most cases, one should also add some potassium (ortho?) phosphate, again dependant upon the growth rate.

Regards,