[AdeDunn]

So, yeah. I had to do a bit of maintenance on my bee tank earlier (hair algae going nuts for one thing...), so decided to put some of the plants out of my "cull"/"retirement" tank in there, boost the plant mass a bit. Now I don't really look into the cull tank very often, all there is in there is plants as it's just an example of me planning ahead.. So you can imagine my surprise when I look in there, and see this...

IMG_20170421_123704_DRO.jpg (751.56 KiB) Viewed 8604 times

A perfect example of how ultra simplicity (only 2 species of plant for 1), and total neglect, sometimes has surprising results. No full tank/front on pics I'm afraid, you can't actually look into this tank from the front as it's a converted sump tank.

[odin]

That's awesome and they look very healthy too, what sort of plant is that?

[AdeDunn]

It's a mix of Helanthium 'Quadricostatus' (used to be Echinodorus) and Heteranthera zosterfolia (my favourite stem plant as it's so easy to grow, without been totally insane). I set this tank up at the same time as my 60 gallon paludarium though, so it has kind of the same experiment in it, in the form of a patch of pond compost buried under the normal sand and gravel. Unlike my big tank though this one is just filtered with 2 diddy air driven sponges. Seems that the dirted method works well no matter what filtration you use, neither has any ferts dosed or CO2 added, the 60 gallon though actually gets maintained. lol I'd certainly use it again, as they've gone much better than my 2 Dennerle tanks where I used Deponit mix under the substrate.