DIRTED TANK INGREDIENTS

Good morning. I want to show you three aquariums that are heavily planted. These are dirted tanks, one of which has been set up for more than 10 years, the other two about five years, and here they are. This is a 55 gallon. It contains three large scats that are living in hard alkaline water and you can see what's growing in here is jungle val and anubias this is on minimum light a couple of blue bulbs that are on 24/7. if you look at the top you can see how the anacharis the val has crisscrossed itself and it's just covering the top these are plants that are lush, very, very active, growing extremely well. The Anubias on the back is doubled and doubled and doubled again. That's tank number one. This is a tank. It's a 40-gallon low four-foot, essentially a 55 but six inches shorter, and you can see it has lots of plants in it. 25. yeah sorry somebody was just asking me the price of the fish this has a good variety of plants in it including some buttes lots of gee whiz there look at that that's a bulb plant this tank's been set up for more than 10 years dirted substrate I pull plants out of here routinely actually it's a little low right now because I've pulled so many out during this time when we're low on plants to be able to have more to sell. This tank down here gets virtually no light. It's got some algae growing in it, but lush, lush plants. Okay, so here's the issue. Would you like to have a tank like one of these? Well, I'm going to show you exactly how to do it by starting with the ingredients. So let's go to the back of the store and put together the supplements for our dirted aquarium. So to do a dirted tank, we're going to go through the ingredients in detail. Now I did a video last fall on the ingredients of the dirted tank. Since then there have been some changes, minor but important. One of the things that I realized is that diatomaceous earth is a fossil and as such it is not calcium. I was under the mistaken assumption that it was a mined product that was not ancient, but it is, and it does not function as a calcium additive. It does function very effective in microscopic bacteria, so I've continued to use it in my substrate. What I'm using instead is calcium chloride. Calcium chloride is made specifically as a calcium additive in saltwater tanks, I've got So let's get started. The foundation of a dirt tank is peat moss. I have a large bag of peat moss. I get all of these supplies, virtually all of them, from my local garden supply shop. So we're going to make enough dirt for a 55 gallon tank. so we will need eight cups of peat moss. Turn this in a little bit so we can maybe capture some of the action. I can't see the camera very well. Three for soil, topsoil, garden soil, potting soil, anything preferably with without fertilizers in it. This is planting mix for trees shrubs and roses. It's all natural. Four cups of this. And then the third item I'm going to put in the soil is be specific. Okay now let's set that set that aside for a moment. Start with Epsom salts and with these it's going to be just really no more than a few ounces of each. This contains magnesium the primary ingredient i'm looking for sulfur which is of little particular consequence so you can see it salts the next thing i'm going to put in is bone meal i had a viewer recently talk about horn as an additive somebody else talked about chicken bone of iron oxide and then we come to the calcium chloride just one one handful of calcium that takes care of the additives with the soil and then i'm going to add water want it to soak to set up new tank see you then