Planted Betta Cube Aquarium Low Tech

Everybody welcome back to the channel. Today we're aquascaping this aquarion cube aquarium for a king betta. To begin I added some sand that is from a recycled aquascape that has already been saturated with beneficial bacteria. I began the hardscape with this branch that was pre-waterlogged so that it would sink. And I know you might have seen this theme with a lot of my recent builds but I used smooth river rocks to help complement the wood. After the initial rock placement was finished I added some fresh white sand to cap everything off and clean things up. I then added some aqua soil to provide nutrients for my background plants. You'll also probably notice that the tank here is pretty scratched up. It's pretty old but these scratches won't actually really be that visible in the finished product and in this I capped the aqua soil with more sand. Smaller detail pebbles were used to finalize the rock layout. The scape was just feeling off balance at this point so I added a smaller stick to kind of lead the lines into the left side of the tank. Even after adding this I wasn't super happy with it so when you see the final shots at the end you'll notice another stick that I added off camera that I think really tied the whole layout together. I left the hardscape for the night and the next morning I came back and decided that the whole tank needs some more detail and I chose to do this in the form of adding some small spindly little sticks that kind of lead lines down the big piece of wood and kind of broke up the big blocky shapes. Now that I was more or less happy with the hardscape I began attaching the first plants which in this case was Christmas moss tied to the big piece of wood with brown sewing thread. I enriched the substrate with a couple root tabs just to make sure that all the plants had plenty of nutrients to get this tank started. I then moved the tank out of the fishroom because this isn't actually going to be a personal room tank this is going to be a bit of a showpiece for our dining room. I began the planting with a Kleiner bar sword. A sprinkling of dwarf Sagittaria in the foreground was next. I filled out the left side of the tank with some Cryptungelata. Doesn't look too good right now but it'll fill in and look really nice. I also later added a Vesuvius sword but that was off camera. Water was added so I could progress with the remainder of the planting a little easier. Although it may need to be removed once the Nymphoides grows in a bit I also added some Limnophila sessiliflora to the right side. I also added a big bush of Grotala indica on the left side of the wood. Brucifalandra wavy green and Anubias nanopetite were added in more shaded areas of the setup to add a little extra detail. Light and lid on this aquarium actually come from a Fluvial Flex. I simply modified the lid to fit this tank better. However, the light on the Fluvial Flex lid is matched a little bit further forward than I'd like it to be but this was a pretty easy fix. The feeding hole on the Fluvial Flex lid is also a problem here because we're planning on keeping a betta in this setup and bettas will readily jump through this hole especially if they're expecting food to come out of it. The easy fix for this was just to create a little lid for it. I made this by gluing two pieces of glass together and then simply spray painting them black so that they blended in to the lid itself. As you can see the smaller piece of glass fits perfectly into the actual opening and the top one keeps it secure. With those problems resolved the tank is done!