From Chaos to Clarity: Transforming an Overgrown Aquascape

Hello everyone! I got the chance again to build one of our walkarounds. The amount of glue that Balazs has used for the sand completely ruined the screwy part. Do you want to come and clean it for me? No Tommy, I won't clean it for you, but I will do a maintenance session for you. Welcome to the beautiful world of aquascaping! This is the cube tank, I will do a maintenance. I just realized something. In the last years, I'm actually not coming in after hours into the gallery. I'm spending most of the days here. If you ask Tommy, some of the days here. But you know, I miss this. Just me and the nature aquariums around me. The fact that I was alone here, after hours, for the whole night, it just gave me something, you know. Having these aquariums is filling me up with a lot of Zen, a lot of calmness. Tommy said in the intro of the build video, that this is going to be a challenge, because this layout is much smaller, than the inspirational layout. The problem not only arises during the build of this setup, but it's also a problem with the maintenance of this setup. Because this Pinotifida is just a huge plant. If you don't trim it like every week, it's gonna grow like crazy. I've got the best maintenance tool here. Check this out! Where's my long scissors, Tommy? He took it. You see all the mistakes, all the problems, you can reach in for the proper tools. It has a top, so you can actually put something in here. Don't scratch the glass, with the tools hanging down from the tool bag! So what's my idea behind maintenance? I would definitely need to trim most of the Pinotifida away and see how much moss is still living underneath the Pinotifida. I'm gonna take my favorite scissors, this is the ADA curved scissors. We need to stop this filter, which is doing its job perfectly. So now the Pinotifida will not run everywhere. You can actually trim at the bottom of this. It looks like it's almost ready. You can also trim it from the bottom. And that's what I'm going to do, is to start trimming the bottoms of it. Starting from the front, moving to the back, leaf by leaf, boring out onto hell. And then after one hour, after I'm finished trimming this one by one, I will get back to you guys and tell you what's next. Cue the chilling music! I started from this corner, because this is what you see, when you enter the Green Apple Gallery. I started to trim two, three leaves together, because I thought that this would make things quicker. Probably 10 minutes later, I'm in a completely state of flow, so this is the first time that I forgot, that I'm doing anything today. The bottom of the rock is a lot more visible, which is really helping with opening up the scape. Okay, so now actually you can see the bottom of the rock, which is cool. Aquascaping is about community. So I love being here at night alone, being in connection one-on-one with nature. But I also love the community, that is behind the aquascaping world. We had people flying in from India, from Brazil and from other continents, just for this. Just to see these aquariums live. And we ship to most European countries, so we have many clients, that are also visiting the Gallery. This pile of Pinotifida is growing. There's a lot of Pinotifida. I will probably dream with Pinotifida after this, Tommy. If you start trimming the top, you end up with these guys. These guys are not very beautiful. This is why you need to trim this one by one, leaf by leaf. Or remove the whole bunch. And trim it down, see? Now I trimmed one patch. It looks like this. I trimmed it from the bottom of it, like here, see? And I could actually save this. And I could actually put this in down here. I don't do this for business. It has a good business aspect. And thanks for the support, very important. But I do this to communicate this feeling, that I have right now. And I think you can have it. You can have it with one aquarium at home. We have a couple of maintenance videos and I explain to you, why getting into a psychological state of flow is very good for your health, mental health. Yeah, what I do is I need to actually find like a good view from the top. So what I'm doing is I'm removing the top leaves one by one, or maybe bunch by bunch, so that I can start seeing what's underneath. I just realized that if you look from below, then you can identify the stems one by one. I certainly gave some depth to the layout, but I certainly took away a lot of detail. And that is very, very concerning. I think I will stop here, before I move on to the other parts of the aquarium. And I will add a little bit of moss, just to see how this whole thing looks. Good thing about this maintenance cart is that you can actually put all the plants and everything that you need on top. So this is the Christmas moss. You take the moss, take however whatever you want, drop the glue into the water and it floats. See, this is floating. You can just take it out. Perfect! This is the Green Aqua gel-type superglue, which is perfect to be used underwater. And it will not harm the fish, because it will not leach anything into the water. Tommy's original idea was to have a lot of moss, which is trimmed regularly, and it's getting thicker on top of the rock. Which will contrast well, the softish texture of the moss will contrast well with the rugged leaf of Pinnatifida. And this is not happening at all, because at the points where I see the moss, at least in this point right there, the moss just didn't get enough light. It wasn't enough to make a good like carpet. So what I have to do, is I have to take Christmas moss and I have to start gluing at that point. I'm trying to revert the whole thing to the original state. This was supposed to be a two-plant layout, but I'm thinking of putting Microsorum in here. So I'm thinking of doing a bold change, to add a little bit of detail to this layout. And it's gonna take away from the minimalist style, but it's going to help with the details a lot. What is this? It's on a coconut pad. I might be happy just tucking this in there. Oh wow, okay, so this helped, right? It gives a lot of shape to the back, but it gives a different kind of feeling to this. I made it better, Tommy! What if I put another bigger leaf, something? I have got a pot of Anubias nana in my hand. I'll just put it in there, see how it looks. I think it distorts the scale. In the front, that's too much. Next step is Bucephalandra Pygmaea Bukit Kelam. Put it there... Ah, perfect! Okay, cool, nice! So let's continue with my favorite scissors and remove some more of the overhanging Pinnatifida leaves, one by one. Five... Six... Seven... Thirty-seven... Thirty-eight... Forty-six... So if we count how many cuts I actually made, I would say that we have made around 500-600 cuts already. And it's gonna be like 2000 cuts at the end of the streaming session. I don't think that there are 2000 cuts in this video, Aaron. Okay, so what's happening here is that I can actually trim this moss from the top, because Tommy said that he wants to do this. So when there's moss that is thick enough, I can actually trim it, which is cool. And then I'm giving it the intended shape. And I will start trimming this Christmas moss, which is actually just hanging here. If I trim it, the bottom will not look good. So I'm actually a little bit afraid of trimming this. But it's not just hanging there, see? Nothing is holding it there. Okay, so Bucephalandra, third pot. Next one is the Green Gnome. Microsorum, another fern. This guy is loose. So I need to like push it down somehow. I found a bigger rock and I will put it exactly on top. So I'm gonna take this and just place it on top of this. There you go! Ta-da! All the Pinnatifida leaves that are on the top and they're shadowing need to go. I cannot even see what I'm doing, I'm just cutting the path and freeing it up half-blind. I'm moving the water. Can you tell which one is fish and which one is plant? No, right? I'm sure this is gonna be ugly when I finish. Tommy's gonna kill me. Any plants that are like leaning against the glass, that is an issue, okay? That doesn't look good, it stays in an artificial way and it needs to be trimmed. Now that we distanced the rocks from each other, it's really helping the layout. So I can see through and I can see background. Detail started to appear. Perspective started to appear, which is good. The rock is really close to the glass and that was the issue. I had a Pinnatifida right here and that wasn't really growing nicely, because it was growing against the glass and I had to remove it. And then patches of glue are starting to be visible, so I need to glue another plant, which is thicker than Pinnatifida here. This guy is just growing everywhere. This rock is done. It was covered with moss and the moss is completely gone. He didn't like the Microsorum here. Distorts the scale. The color is good. And it's more delicate. Well, I could find the Nero. Because the Microsorum terrapus had a bigger leaf structure and I wasn't really happy about it. And I will try to put in the Nero now. Yes! Very good! This Nero is really helping it. Two and a half hours of maintenance and I am kind of ready with trimming, adding a lot of new plants. What has changed? Besides the hardscape? Besides me being very tired? In two and a half hours that guy, that Lotus flower has come out and bloomed. If Áron didn't switch on the light for the shooting, it could have happened tomorrow. Since I first came here, like literally two minutes ago, this flower has opened up completely. How crazy is that? The nature is with us, guys! This is what I told you at the beginning. This is what I love. We finish it here and I'll come back in four days, to show you how this aquarium evolved. We are four days later and the Lotus on the left side is no longer blooming, but there's a new one coming out here. I'm happy with what's happening with the 550. Let's see if I'm happy with what's happening with this aquarium. First of all, Tommy wasn't happy. Because I put that rock in there, on the top of this thing, so I had to remove it this morning. The main idea of having just two plants, the Pinot de Fida and the mosses in this scape was working perfectly and I introduced Bucephalandra and some Microsorum over there. They didn't like that fact. I think they're right, but I still like it as it is, so I'm not gonna take out all the plants, that I put in. You can actually argue, if it's better or worse, let me know in the comments. It's cleaner, you can see through better, you don't have a big mass of one plant overgrowing the other. You have details, the pathways between the rocks are visible, the whole scape is really balanced. The balance of fish and plants and hardscape is okay. I wouldn't say I'm 100% happy, because I didn't make anything like groundbreaking with this work here. But at least I brought a tank, that was on the verge of being super overgrown into an acceptable form. I thought that the best idea was to use these plants in there, like these Bucephalandras, these greener Bucephalandras, to like enhance the reddish, darker look of the scape. Do you have any other ideas? Let me know in the comments, because you know, I was debating a lot on what to use during the maintenance phase of this video. If you guys haven't seen the original build video with Tommy, then come back and check that out. It's gonna be listed here and let me know what you think about this tweaking session. I'll let you know what Tommy thought. The original looks much better.