I made a simple low tech shallow planted tank

Hi everyone, welcome to a new video. I'm here at Tropica headquarters in Denmark and they've recently moved into their new marketing office and consequently our job today is to scape this shallow Weo aquarium. It's 75 centimetres, about two and a half feet long, lit with a Kessel kind of type light. I can't remember what the brand is. This is Weo actually, so you've got the controllable spectrum and intensity there. We've got an Oase Biomaster 250 with some clear pipe work and some acrylic aquario inlet and outlet and the quite interesting concept is going to be, we're going to create a kind of island composition over to the left but it's going to be coming out of the water and then we're going to have the filter outlet coming over the top and then trickling all over the rocks and the plants. So quite similar to my little tiny shallow waterfall tank at home. So that's the job, we've got some materials ready, got some rocks and sand and then later on obviously we'll be adding the plants. So here's the sand in there, just a very thin layer to act as a cosmetic interest. It's nothing to do with really growing any plants in the sand, we're going to be using the vast majority of the stonework there to attach our plants such as moss, small epiphytes and these are all going to be plants that can grow both underwater and out of water. So you may have noticed we are actually filming the process for the Tropica YouTube channel as well, so do stay tuned to that for some excellent videos coming soon. I've been working on the ultimate aquascaping tutorial video and Jonas, the chap here, the editor is doing a fine job, I'm really excited to see that one coming out. So next job we'll be adding the lava rock I guess you'd call this, it's like a browny red lava rock and this is going to be rounded up here and the great thing about lava rock is it's very porous so it's an excellent material to attach our plants to and then maybe see what the vibe's like but we could also have some vine-like effect like twigs or pieces of wood coming kind of over the stone to add a little bit more interest as well, so we'll see how we feel about that later. So here's the finished rock layout and decided to make it a peninsula style, so it's actually going to be jutting outwards into the room, so a bit of a room divider kind of style. So we've done an island jutting through the aquarium, so from above you can see it's like this really nice perimeter of open sand and then all of this lovely red lava to attach our plants to, it's going to look great. Okay I've added some small broken pieces of I think it's red mooroo or spiderwood, just wedged it in between the lava rocks there, fitted the filter, this is a Binemaster 250, adapted the hose from a 16mm internal diameter to a 12mm clear hose and then that runs into the pipe work which we talked about earlier. And now this is the experimental kind of stage where we've got the outlet here and that needs to trickle as effectively as we can over the rocks and then that will determine where we put most of our plants. So they need, depending on the plant, depends on the sort of level of moisture or humidity it needs, but the aquarium is only going to be filled to a third height probably. So yeah it's looking really great, really happy with the progress so far. So we've got water in, the filter's running, we decided actually to go for almost a fully submerged setup. A couple of reasons, the main one being it's really challenging to get the water to come over the top of the rocks without creating too much noise and splashing and it would require a lot more kind of complex plumbing I would suggest. So we're going to keep it relatively simple, we've got a lily pipe completely submerged of course in the water and now I'm going to select some plant species from the lab and from the greenhouse suitable for this scape. So here we are in the 1-2 grow storage area, as you can see literally thousands of pots here. I've already pre-selected mine so those just here, go through very quickly. Basically got a range of the Buccaplandras, this is the needle leaf, wavy green, bucket column, Kedagang Buccaplandra, a couple of pots of Cameanthus Cuba which is going to be growing sort of semi-immersed hopefully, and then we've got Hygrophyllis cephalum which flowers really lovely out of water. The plant's all prepared, so we've got the Buccaplandra needle leaf here, the bucket column here, Kedagang here, the Cuba here, and then the Hygrophyllis cephalum here. So now it's a case of attaching it to the appropriate places amongst the hardscape, so just a case of wedging it I think, and the porous nature of the rock is really going to help those plants self-attach relatively quickly. The Cuba and the cephalum are going to be most sort of definitely coming out of the water somewhat, and in particular the cephalum should produce some flowers very soon, so that's exciting. So here it is, fully planted, flooded, with equipment fitted, and I think it looks really great. It is going to be a slow grower and no CEC at the moment. I would, if it was growing at home, I probably would add CEC to start with, but they want super low maintenance here in the office, so I'd suggest shrimp only. This is going to be interesting to see how this turns out. So the idea is it's going to be kind of half flooded, half submerged, a little bit immersed, constantly going up and down as the water evaporates, and then water changes, and then top up. So it will be interesting to see if it survives in the long term, but hopefully it will do. And then lots of opportunity to add more epiphytes if we wanted to, maybe some mosses. We could smash up some smaller bits of lava stone, add some more detail work, but the overall concept I think is really, really strong. It's quite interesting to use so much of the footprint of the aquarium. You've got this kind of exposed swampy area here, which I think looks really cool. So I'd just put shrimp in here, but you could put some fish maybe. Let me know what you'd put in here. Lots of hiding places in those little caves. Something very small obviously. Another thing I might do is add floating plants actually, to shade a little bit of the Abusive Ballandra there. So yeah, that's the escape done, and it will be moved into its final location somewhere in the office over the next few days, and then hopefully something we can report back on in a few months once it's looking nice and mature. So thanks for watching, take care, see you on the next one. Cheerio.