Aquascaping A Perfect Simple Low Budget Betta Tank

Hey everybody welcome back to the channel. So this story all started with this betta right here who used to inhabit this tank. I adopted him when he was just a little over maybe two years old and I kept him for 10 months in my care. About a month ago he slowly started wasting away just from old age kind of how I've seen bettas do in the past and I knew his time was coming so I sort of let him comfortably live out his life in this tank until his time did come but now that he has sadly passed away and his tank is open it's time to move on and create a new scape for a new fish. So in today's video we're going to be turning this vacant five gallon aquarium into the perfect simple betta aquarium. I started with a standard five and a half gallon aquarium a nikru sky led aquarium light and a simple hang on back filter from amazon. In order to achieve the clean look I wanted I blacked out the back of this aquarium with construction paper. Once this was done I was left with a blank canvas. I wanted to do a scape in this tank that anybody could do and was super simple so we're only going to be going with two rocks and one piece of wood. As you guys probably know by now all these materials are locally collected by me so none of these I purchased at all and I really think that that's a great way to save cost on your aquarium design and also sort of make the whole process a little more exciting for you the creator. However this is not something everybody can do so make sure to look into local laws in your area and do a little bit of research on what rocks and stone you can collect. It's never strayed me wrong collecting my own hardscape but I have heard some horror stories so be safe. I secured the wood to the rocks with a couple dabs of GE silicone one. After the silicone had dried I added in my sand. This is locally collected lake sand from the same place these rocks are from so it ties in really nicely. In order to tie the hardscape into the sand and embellish the scape I added pea gravel and some strategic areas. When you're doing detail like this with little pieces of rock and gravel it's definitely recommended to just sort of push them into little pockets around the hardscape and places where big pieces transition into open beds of sand and when you start doing that your scapes are really going to come to another level. I embellished the hardscape with a bunch of twisty little branches. I don't really know what kind these are but we have a tree in our yard that grows them and they just work great for aquariums so what I did was I super glued them to the main piece of wood to provide some detail. I also added some bunches of alder cones to the layout. Not only do these help you achieve a super natural look in your tank but they're also super beneficial for your betta. However, they do stain your water pretty severely so if you don't like that use at your own risk. So I guess I am sort of breaking the rule of this only being one piece of wood and two pieces of rock but I felt like the scape was really missing something and this little extra stick seemed to fit the bill perfectly. In keeping with the simple theme of this scape I went very light and started by just using some anubias in this little patch. I had pretty much completely designed the scape around using this anubias in this area because I knew it would look great. it's important to keep your plants thoroughly misted while you're planting them so they don't dry out. I planted a few sprigs of dwarf sagittaria around the hardscape just to give a little extra detail but this isn't really very necessary. A lid is essential for just about every betta tank unless the water level is very low. These lids are ones that I custom made myself for this tank and I definitely think that lid making is a that just about every fish keeper should know and it's actually really easy. One week later and our tank is ready for its new inhabitant. In order to get a tank ready this quickly I made sure to add cycled biological media the day before I was adding our fish and I have a nice little 50 watt heater neatly concealed behind the hardscape in the back left corner. you