Ten gallon on a shelf, inert pea gravel that I am not tearing out, and about 20 dollars a month to spend on this hobby total. Planting is mostly crypts and a couple of swords with some floaters. Everyone online says use both, but if I am picking one to start with, which gives the bigger return in a tank with no CO2?
With crypts and swords as your main plants, root tabs, easily. Both of those are root feeders and in inert gravel they have nothing to pull from. A box of tabs is maybe 12 dollars and lasts a ten gallon most of a year if you are placing three or four at a time near the root masses.
The floaters are the exception since they feed from the water column, but floaters in a low tech tank grow on fish waste alone in my experience.
Every three to four months, marked on a calendar. Waiting for symptoms means you are already a month behind, since deficiency shows in new leaves that take weeks to appear.
That is the answer I was hoping for since tabs are cheaper. Do I need to replace them on a schedule or wait for symptoms?
A cheat that costs nothing: cap a corner of the gravel with a handful of used substrate or squeezed filter gunk from an established tank if anyone locally will give you some. It seeds bacteria and adds organics to the gravel bed, which crypts genuinely respond to.
Slight disagreement, or at least a caveat. Tabs cover nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium at the roots but the traces still matter, and green spot algae is usually a water column phosphate problem. If you can stretch to a small bottle of all in one liquid at about 15 dollars that also lasts a ten gallon nearly a year at low tech doses, you are covering both for not much more.
@springtail_stella · 11mo ago · 2 replies
Whatever you buy, go slow with dosing in a ten gallon. Small tanks swing hard and most bottle instructions are written for tanks with pressurised CO2 running. I dose about a third of the label amount weekly and nothing has ever looked hungry.
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@tenon_tuesday · 10mo ago
Third of label, noted. That also stretches the bottle which suits the budget.
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