Dry Start Method-Update yet again

[Admin]

After trying unsuccessful to grow a nice carpet of Dwarf baby tears/HC due to the fact that it was always floating up and I ended up losing all of it, I read up on a technique called the dry start method. Basically you grow plants in your tank without filling it up with water. You must use some sort of nutritious substrate and keep humidity very high in the tank- this is done by filling up the tank only to substrate line, misting the tank daily with water and covering it fully either with a glass top or plastic wrap. Most plants can be grown like this aka emmersed, but a few cannot so you must research first. You can also run your lights for like 12 hours a day, the benefits are: you can run lights longer, plants have unlimited access to Co2 in the air, plants do not uproot, no risk of algae and minimal maintenance (no fertilizer dosing or water changes). The length to run the dry start method is completely up to you, generally two weeks is a minimum- once you are happy with the growth/roots, you then add water and fish.

For myself I am using ADA Aquasoil Amazonia as a substrate, using a hydrometer to measure humidity (found for like $2 on eBay), misting water to keep humidity around 80-90% and will be running my lights 12 hours a day. The plants I am growing with the dry start method currently are:

-Dwarf baby tears, dwarf hair grass, Staurogyne Repens, Ludwigia repens, Rotala Rotundifolia, hygrophila polysperma, Crypt sp wendtii, Limnophila aquatica, Pogostemon stellata, java fern, and Taiwan moss

I will see how it goes and update every once in awhile to see if this works.

[guppyguy]

This is awesome and I am very interested to see how well many of those plants do. If this goes well I may try this myself. I heard dwarf hair grass does especially well with this method. Best of luck

[Admin]

Ya I have always wanted to try this as many people have had great success with it. Only time will tell

[andynater]

Looks good already

[Deleted]

This is really cool. I had no idea you could do this. I always thought aquatic plants had to be under water. I hope i don't sounds dumb saying that. I just don't know a lot about aquatic plants. But I hope it works.

[gabor129]

If this works for you, I would love to try it as well!

[Admin]

Jul 27, 2013 22:33:54 GMT -5 @fishvent said:

This is really cool. I had no idea you could do this. I always thought aquatic plants had to be under water. I hope i don't sounds dumb saying that. I just don't know a lot about aquatic plants. But I hope it works.

Only certain species of plants can handle this, but humidity must be kept very very high

[Admin]

Jul 28, 2013 9:18:06 GMT -5 gabor129 said:

If this works for you, I would love to try it as well!

Hopefully it does, I will update it every so often

[Admin]

Update, I have been getting some pretty good growth especially with the baby tears. I also added another 2 pots of HC. I am still misting 2-3 times daily with humidity around 80-85%. I had one casualty, my Ludwigia repens died, it just melted away for some reason. All the stems are doing well but the dry start method is more geared towards foreground plants so that's where most growth is seen. I will probably continue for at least another week or 2.

[guppyguy]

Awesome update, looking really good. Too bad on the repens but like you said this is mostly for the foreground plants. Baby tears look really healthy.

[Admin]

Okay so after almost a month I decided it was time to fill the tank, the HC looked well rooted and had spread pretty well. From what I hear this is the critical part as sometimes your plants can melt away going from immersed (dry) to submersed (wet) growth. That's why its important to keep humidity around 80-90% as that's suppose to prevent melting in the change over. Right now there are no fish in the tank as I have my Co2 blasting, I will play it by ear when to add fish. Also it will take some time for the stem plants to begin growing and take their correct shape as many have been growing horizontally during the dry phase.

[guppyguy]

Looking great, awesome update.

[Rainbowfish Alan]

I also had very little success with the traditional wet start method. The dry start method seems to be the way to go with HC. Looking very good.

[Admin]

ya so far its been great, just have to have patience especially when looking at an empty fish tank

[Admin]

So its been a little bit since I flooded the tank, plants are growing great, one oddity I have found- stems are growing very slowly since the tank was filled with water, I cut back on the lighting period to 7 hours; which I think was a mistake and have since increased it to 9.5/10 hours a day. Co2 has been cut back significantly since I added fish, still no sign of black beard algae. I am still dosing EI and I added ADA special "lights" fertilizer to supplement. I had a slight die off and uprooting of baby tears as I did a hydrogen peroxide treatment to battle a bad case of green hair algae- I probably won't use hydrogen peroxide again with a carpet of baby tears as I found they do not react well to it and the mass oxygenation caused by it uproots baby tears tiny rooting system. Still looking for the HC to fill in some gaps, but its getting there, might upgrade my lighting soon.

The discus wouldn't move out of the way of some picture, so I apologize.