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0:00:03.3 Alex: Hi, I'm Alex, and this is Tank Tested, and this is my 150-gallon aquascape. Today, we're gonna do maintenance on this tank because it's been a while since I've trimmed the plants. This tank is about 150 days old, and I probably haven't trimmed anything for at least 30 days. So everything is starting to get really overgrown and plants are starting to be shaded out. For this setup, I have used my old build my LED light strip to light the tank, rather than my UNS Titan 1. Normally, I would just take the lights off completely, but I've added this so that you can see what's going on. Today, we're going to be using a pair of scissors and a pair of pinsets, so let's get started. We're gonna start with these stems. Now, this is pretty easy. Literally, all I'm gonna do is beat this back down to as little as I can. My ultimate goal will be to have the top of the stems be behind whatever is in front of them. Because when stems grow, they bifurcate from the cut mark, which means that if you cut above where they're visible, then you see that bifurcation. Whereas if you cut below where they're visible, you don't see that bifurcation anymore, and it looks like you have twice as many stems. It's a really cool effect.
0:01:36.3 Alex: So right now, I'm just whacking it back. This is like a hair cut. These plants are gonna bounce back just fine. There's really nothing to worry about in that capacity. And I've turned off the filter, so the water is really, really flat right now, so there's no ripples, so I can actually see everything that I'm doing up here. It's kind of a cool effect. So again, just ripping out all of my stems. The rhizome plants, like the Java Fern, are a little bit more complex because you can't just trim off their leaf tips, they won't like that. But the stems, stems don't really care, and that's because that's, evolutionarily, the path that they've chosen. In fact, these stems, each of these little bits, in nature, if they were to break off and float downstream or to another part of the pond, they have a very good chance of re-routing because many of them already have established runner roots coming from the stem. So that's actually how they reproduce in the wild. They'll just pop off or be gnawed off by an inquisitive or hungry animal, and hopefully, a little piece of it will continue to float downstream and they'll be able to establish somewhere else.
0:03:02.7 Alex: It's a really, really lovely system, and it's a system that we can exploit in aquascaping. Now, I've found that there is a diminishing return. In my experience, at some point, your stems become so bifurcated, so trimmed back that they start to not look as good. They start to really suffer. And the solution to that is usually to do a really, really, really deep trim. Basically, cut them down to just above where they first start to leaf out, and that kind of resets the whole process. It means that you lose all the bifurcations that you built up over the course of many trimmings, but that can help if your plants start to look not as good as they used to. The other thing that may be happening is you may end up with a situation where you've kind of robbed your substrate of all its nutrients, because all of this plant matter that I'm cutting off, the nutrients came from the substrate. So at some point, that substrate is kinda tapped out because these plants are being taken out of the tank. And if that's the case, your options are, one, you continue to dose the water column, if you're not already, making sure that your plants get a little bit of nutrients that way.
0:04:29.0 Alex: But the other thing that you can do, is you can start adding root tabs to the substrates to add nutrients back into your substrate. Now, back here, I've got some water wisteria, which is another stem, which I don't really want popping up over it. I haven't really figured out what I'm doing with this yet, but I'm just gonna trim them out of sight. I don't know that you can even see it back here. There's a big bush of it. Now, hopefully, it's all out of sight. While I'm at it, so I've also got these lotus plants and the lotus leaves are lovely, but I wanna keep them low, like these in the foreground, although there is one that's starting to die, which we'll deal with in a second. So I wanna just get these out of here for now. I might change my mind, because right now, they're in the back of the tank, so they're totally obscured from your view. But for now, I'm just gonna get rid of them, and hopefully, they'll eventually start bushing up.
0:05:40.0 Alex: The one thing I don't like is when these lotus leaves reach the surface of the water, because then they spread out. It just looks like a stick running up to the surface of the water, and their large surface area blocks a lot of the light below, which isn't great for the other plants in the tank. So I try to remove them as soon as they reach the surface of the water, because you can kind of train your plants. They'll start to learn, and the way that plants do, that if you grow up to the surface of the water, you're gonna get eaten. And plant doesn't wanna get eaten, so it's gonna start staying tighter to the bottom of the aquascape, which is what I want.
0:06:25.2 Alex: So I got a whole bunch of debris. I've still gotta deal with this plant down here, so I'll just start hacking away. I'm probably gonna have to hop off this ladder at some point and do some trimming off camera, because I can only get so much of a grasp of what I'm doing from this angle. This tank is 2 feet across and 2 feet deep. So down here is pretty far away from my line of sight, but I'm still trying to get what I can out. And there's no need to be delicate about this. Plants will be fine. Now, if this was a competition aquascape, where I was really trying to win, I would be a lot more delicate because, basically, what you wanna do is you wanna trim each cycle. So let's say that your aquascape is 10 weeks away from your photograph, your final competition image. If the plant grows 2 inches in a week, then you would want to trim maybe every two weeks, and you'd wanna trim maybe an inch and a half to 2 inches up the stem.
0:07:49.0 Alex: And in doing that, one stem that you planted 10 weeks ago would eventually reach... Let's see. Two times two times two times two. Let's see if I can do that math. So the first trim is one, the second term is two, third trim is four stems, now you've got four stalks coming out from one base. The fourth trim is eight stalks and the fifth trim is 16. So if you know that you want your plant to just peek above the background, say right here, you want a nice big bush of red plants. Well, if you start trimming 10 inches down and every week you start trimming 2 inches higher, eventually, you get to the point where, at the very top, one stem becomes 16, and you can create a really, really beautiful bush from just a few initial trimmings. So that's the magic of stems. The downside, as you're seeing here, is that they grow and they kind of can take over a tank and crowd out all the light. That's probably what's happened here with this lotus leaf that I've just ripped out. It wasn't getting enough light, so the plant decided to stop feeding it nutrients and suck as much nutrients back into the plant as it could, and that's why it started to die.
0:09:07.9 Alex: It's not a big deal. The plant is still healthy. All the leaves are from that same plant. They all look good. It's not a big deal. But it is something that can happen, and if you end up not trimming your plants frequently enough, as I have right now, I'm starting to really get at risk of crowding out some of my more fragile plants. They're at the bottom of the aquarium. And once we do this trim, I'm sure it's gonna reveal that a lot of my plants at the substrate level have suffered a fair amount from my lack of maintenance. But it's just the course of doing business. I don't feel nearly as bad about not trimming my plants on a regular basis as I would about not taking care of my fish. Because ultimately, I've made the decision that I care much more about the lives of fish than the lives of plants. And in many instances, you can bring a plant back from the brink, whereas if you mistreat a fish, A, that's terrible, but also, much harder to bring it back.
0:10:13.9 Alex: This lovely stem is also in need of a good trim, it's really just starting to expand beyond its intended range. And while it's beautiful, I mean really like a stunner, this isn't necessarily what I want it to be doing. Probably want a little bit less bush, and it's really crowded out everything that was beneath it, and that was not my intention. I planted it as an accent and it liked these conditions so much that in just about 50 days, it's kind of taken over the top of this log completely. And now that it's established, it's gonna keep growing back faster. These plants put a lot of energy into their root system. This is now pretty firmly attached to the log and to the substrate that I piled on top of the log. And now that it's done that work, you can put most of its energy into putting out new growth in the form of leaves. So that's another thing that you'll see when you are taking care of an aquascape, is initially, the plants may grow relatively slowly, but they're not suffering. What they're actually doing is they're investing in their future. They're putting a bunch of growth into the soil. And then, maybe three to six weeks after they are initially planted, they'll start to really explode. And that's a sign that they're really well established.
0:11:50.2 Alex: And that's awesome, it means that your plants are really going to thrive, but it also means that you've gotta be on top of your game and make sure that you don't let them overrun your aquarium. So with that, I'm gonna take a break. I'm gonna do the rest of the trimming of my stems, Java Fern, the Buce, and the Bolbitis, as well as some of the Anubias that's really, really hidden within these stems, which hopefully, we'll be able to see again after this trim. Alright, so I think we're gonna call this a day. There's still a fair amount that needs to be tinkered with, but I'll do that off-camera over the next few days as things become apparent to me. In the meantime, I'm going to turn my tank back on, the filter running again, have it suck out as much of this debris as I can. I've gotten most of it out, but there's still a few leaves here and there. And then, tomorrow, I'm gonna do a water change and I'm going to clean my filtration. That way, I get all of that decaying matter out of the tank before it starts to rot. So I will get to that, and then let's see how this tank progresses.
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