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What's Everyone Using For Substrate


Serpentkeeper_dfmc
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For a planted tank, you'll benefit a lot if you use a substrate meant for plants. Some thing like Ada, Tropica aquarium soil/substrate combo, Eco complete, Dirted/Walstad (can't rearrange things to much) all work best in my opinion.

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I used to spend a fortune on "Plant substrates"... now, if I want a high CEC under a sword or Crypt, I'll add a few clay balls, but still just use $8/50lbs playsand and Estimative Index fertilizing.

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If it is a single small tank going with commercial solutions takes less thinking/risking and won't cost too much. If it is a big tank or the first of many I would go with a play sand cover layer and organic/clay bottom layer. I was just looking at clays today and Edmonton has a clay specialty store for pottery that would be interesting to check out. Originally I was going to dig up some bentonite clay from the river valley but discovered that there are different bentonites that use different metal ions: magnesium, calcium, barium, iron, potassium, or sodium. I guess the latter is the safest choice and it apparently is exactly what some "all-natural" cat litter material is made off. Somebody just brought up cat litter as a cheap and easy substrate material in another thread last week, so I bet this is how that would work. I would still add some organic material as well. Either organic, non-fertilized, potting soil or peat moss. Someone on the net also used vermiculite as a component for his substrate and this is another variety of clay. So many choices but I expect that many of them do the work so no need to overthink. In my last project I actually just dug up dirty sand from a pool in the river valley and used the blackish goo as the bottom layer. It worked so far but on my next tank I will try the clay/organics approach.

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Yes that is the store and they do have some with high iron content to give the clay/pottery a reddish color. If you go let us know how it worked out.

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Yes that is the store and they do have some with high iron content to give the clay/pottery a reddish color. If you go let us know how it worked out.

For sure I will update this thread.

Update: So I called the pottery supply and ask for a redart clay (high iron content). Lucky they still have a couple of small bags available, supposedly this raw clay is a fav among pottery makers and they run out quickly. I got a 5lbs clay redart (Cedar Heights) for 5$. Another good thing of getting raw clay is its powder form compare to clay bodies that are pre-mixed (with different chemical contents) ready for use.

So yeah drop in their store, the manager is pretty knowledgeable about their products.

Edited by variatus
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I recommend getting a good dose of floating plants to suck up nutrients released from the soil into the water as the tank starts up. Once the tank settles there should be very little release of soil nutrients into the water and you can reduce/remove the floating plants. However, I always like to keep floating plants. They grow faster and thus remove a lot of waste products without competing with the other plants for CO2. They are also easy to harvest. I direct my pump outlet so all floaters end up in one corner where they do not affect light-sensitive submerged plants.

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