My first attempt at a 1ft Iwagumi setup

Nicely done. What are you going to do down the right side? Carpet or bring the grass forward?

 

Both.. Carpet front half, grass back half, its not growing as fast there due to the shadow cast by the big rock.. Probably going to make some light changes soon.

 

Any ideas how to contain hairgrass? Mine is now starting to completely take over the tank and invading the HC carpet big time.. Every week the hairgrass pops up all over and through my HC and I have been painfully trimming it right down to the substrate in those areas, this just seems to make it come back stronger lol. The issue is, if I try to pull the blades out (to try to grab the roots) I inevitably always pull out chunks of the HC too.

So I'm concerned now... this tank is going to end up just one big hairgrass orgy.

 

"- trim hairgrass out of the offending areas.. just trim it at the level of the HC.. thats how amano keeps his manicured.. no need to pull out"

Well as I said, that's what I have been doing, but it just grows back within like two days and seems to be getting thicker... lol

 

Aside from that being a pain in the balls.. having to manicure every other day... I'm also concerned that so much of it amongst the HC will eventually out-compete the HC and kill it off, like how weeds on a nice lawn do, or grass in a flowerbed.

 

Haircut

 

The hairgrass looks odd now. It's got thick so you don't get the light through it like before. Maybe if you had a gentle transition from the HC on the left and right it wouldn't be so "blunt".

 

Trim the hairgrass right to the bottom.. a heavy trim..

 

Why?

 

Update

 

I love it!

 

Update, not much of a change, but update anyway =)

 

Not too much? Haha look at the last pic and this! It's grown in huge man... lookingredients super nice blue.. well done

 

Really looking very nice!

I personally feel that you should have a transition from the carpet to rock and carpet to HG. Maybe S.Repens for the transition, will add another layer to your already awesome scape!

 

I could try some s. reppens around the rocks. But let me tell you, that HC is sooo lush and thick that it would be a mission and not sure if the reppens would even survive. There is so much HG in the HC carpet too (you cant see the HG in the HC because I constantly trim it down to the carpet height).. The combo of the HC and HG roots might starve reppens. Dunno, will give it a go once my reppens in the big tank recoup from the rescape done there.

 

Update.. Kept losing too many baby shrimp to the canister filter, so I retrofitted the inlet with wire mess, hopefully that will reduce the losses. Mr. Snail is just visiting the tank for a while to help the clean up crew for now.

 

So want to try the wire mesh but dont know where to get some. The sponges, filter floss just never works and gets packed up to quickly and then affecting the flow of the filter?

 

Buy a cheap sieve from the crazy store, cut to size and just cable tie it onto the inlet pipe. I also added some of that very course black sponge stuff from one of my old internal filters inside the mesh.

 

Here's a close up... Could have probably been a bit neater, but from normal distance it looks fine.