How to Set Up a Dirted Tank - step #2 - planting the dirted aquarium

Well, good morning. This is Father Fitch. This is the plant, the tank, that we set up yesterday as a dirt tank. Today we're going to scape it and plant it. There are a few little tricks I want to show you. Well, let's see, the first one goes to this black line of dirt sitting under the sand. Some people find that unattractive. So here's what we'll do about it. Take the end of your net, run it down along the edge of the tank all the way to the bottom. Right through the sand to the bottom. What that does is it gets sand all the way to the bottom. It completely disappears. the dirt line without causing very much of a problem. See, I am pulling up a little dirt. You want to be careful doing this. But it will get rid of that dark line all together. Just go slow, be patient, be gentle, and you'll be able to clear it all up pretty easily. I want you to really see what I'm doing here. I'll bring the camera over a little later and you'll be able to see that we've completely gotten rid of that visible dirt line, the soil line. There we go. That's pretty well done. We're going to level the sand out. Very good. Now, a couple of tricks. a piece of driftwood and we're going to glue some plants to it. Here is an aquatic bird. Now, how do we do this? I have a tube of cement here that I can't get the lid off of, so I've got a little hole in the side. I'm just going to squeeze it out, make a little line of of super glue about the length of the rhizome and then I'll set the rhizome to super glue. Try to keep it off my fingers. And that's going to seal it right on there. Pretty good. I have to get this in the water pretty quick. I've also got a little net-a-petite to get a little more glue out to find a place for this. Over here, I think, would go. Okay, I'll show you what that looks like. Now let's place it in the tank. kind of toward the back a little, just barely press it down, I don't need to go deep, it's just enough to keep it stable. Now I've got a few other plants I'm going to put in, here's some redwood weed chip, it'll go in one corner, there's another piece, there's another piece, do this all in one one section here, kind of grew the plant. Then I have a nice bunch of parts that grew out. I'll show you the tank these came out on later. It's a tank that's about 10 years old. It has not been touched except the full plants out of in the 10 years it's been set up. Out of my mother's tank grows a lot of plants. I'm going to put these more or less to the back. See if we can form a kind of a curtain on the back. The tweezers that I'm using are so helpful to keep your fingers out of the dirt. Because the tweezers are much thinner than my big fat fingers. It's a lot less messy than it would otherwise be. I'm running these in front and in back of the freshwood. There's a little piece of Bacopa. See, we'll break some of that stem off. Put him in this corner. Got a little more I'll get as I finish these corkscrews. Last one. right there one floating floating a little more of a bacopa you can put this the other corner there's a pretty rigid stem so they press in pretty easily so i've got a few other plants left we have a little plant for the front it's a java fern plant came off the pole when i pulled it now, and it'll continue to grow. It will eventually grow a new bulb. And that's just a few more here, and another little bit of bacopa, and that's it. Now what I need to do at this point is build the shape. So I'll do this from my existing aquarium back here. Hold my hand over the water so it doesn't stir up the bottom the real trick with these dirted tanks is to make sure you don't stir the bottom up because if you do you're going to make a mess you won't be able to clean it up you have to tear the tank down and get it back to normal okay that's enough work for now let's bring the net over i mean the camera over and take a look see if we can get a sense of what what we're looking at here.