[00:00] This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Hi, I'm Adam Ragusea, I'm a YouTube cook, and in my spare time I tool around in this greenhouse that's in my backyard.
[00:12] I have an updated tour for you today. As you'll see, I have been working on my aquascaping skills with a Z, and things are really starting to come together. If you have watched previous tours, the first thing that you will note is the big metal trough is gone.
[00:30] replaced with an acrylic bathtub. It looked best at night, so we'll save that for the end. We'll start here in the morning. I've got something new to install.
[00:42] I glued a magnet to the underside of this hanging planter, and I bought a magnetic light. Turn her on, and that is going to be very flattering on my new mini shallow tank.
[00:54] It's a stack of lava rocks with a tiny filter in the back corner, which just sends a little waterfall trickling over the front face there. It's starting to grow into itself. It's still kind of new. There's two kinds of hydrocodile, pennywort, growing up out of the water,
[01:09] and the floating rosette on the right there is water lettuce. Don't try to eat it. So apparently the powdered leaves are a traditional analgesic. And then I've got the mini purple bamboos sticking up tall in the background there.
[01:23] Awesome plants. So I'm hoping that it will stand a little straighter as it matures. It's kind of floppy right now. Underwater, we have hairgrass and Pogostemon helferi, which really likes my hard water that I've got here,
[01:35] and, of course, blue shrimp. This is a shrimp breeding tank. Fun fact, baby shrimp are called shrimplets because they do not go through a larval stage.
[01:47] They hatch as tiny copies of their parents. I always imagine a fast, casual family singing restaurant putting shrimplets on their appetizer menu. Just the name, I mean. It sounds like an appetizer.
[02:01] Pretty much any tank with no fish in it will become a shrimp breeding tank because Neo-Carotena shrimp breed so readily. As long as there are no fish to eat the babies, there will be babies. Many, many babies.
[02:14] And shrimp don't mind the wild temperature swings that I get in this little tank because there's so little water to retain heat. I do have a tiny heater in the back corner as well. I just love how wild this little tank looks.
[02:27] It was swamped with algae until one day it just wasn't anymore. The snails and the microfauna tipped the ecological balance, I think. Never had a scrap of algae on this aquascape.
[02:40] I used to have my golf course tank in here, but it kind of petered out, and I started fresh using a traditional Japanese method that worked like a charm. And by traditional, of course, I mean from the 1990s.
[02:52] This is my first attempt at a nature aquarium in the style of Takashi Amano. Somebody is hiding there. Is he going to come out and put on a show? Yes, he is.
[03:04] This blue betta is so incredibly good at being a fish. I've had him for years. He's so hardy. He doesn't mind the temperature swings in the greenhouse, and he's just gotten prettier and prettier.
[03:17] He's way more blue than he used to be. I would have named him if I'd known that he would live this long. So yeah, with this Amano method, you use driftwood as a frame for aquatic ferns and mosses,
[03:30] which grow free in the water column, and then you have stem plants rooted in soil in the background. The rocks form a barrier to hold the soil back from the decorative sand in the front,
[03:42] if you want decorative sand. Because this tank is in the corner of the greenhouse, I wanted it to look like a forested island in the corner of the tank. The sand functions like a shoreline.
[03:55] And it's my first dab at this style, so I do see some things that violate the rules. The little bright green anubias plants near the base, they look too regular in their size and their placement.
[04:07] It doesn't look random enough to be natural. Same deal with the rock sizes. There should be more variation. otherwise it looks like a human construction. And I shouldn't have anything touching the front wall like that big moss log there,
[04:20] but I just like it when aquariums break the fourth wall, so to speak. At night, my cootie loaches come out, these little eel-looking guys. They're left over from when this was the golf course tank, and they seem much more comfortable in this aquascape.
[04:34] There's many more hiding places. You literally only see them at night, looking around for whatever food dropped down during the day Of course the main reason my tanks look so much better these days is that I gone to the dark side I now injecting CO2 micro into most of my tanks
[04:52] Lack of available carbon really limits plant growth underwater. Remember that the entire plant kingdom evolved first on land, in the air, and then some plants kind of returned to the water.
[05:05] If you give plants as much carbon in the water as they would get in the air, then they just explode. My little cube here is not Amano style, but I am using Amano's strong side, weak side design principle,
[05:17] where one side is like 1.2 times the visual weight of the other side. That avoids unnatural symmetry. So, speaking of CO2, look how it has changed my water table there.
[05:30] It's just a wood frame with some pond liner nailed in. It took me an afternoon to build. and it's plumbed into the bathtub system there, which, you may remember, used to be a galvanized steel trough.
[05:42] I got rid of the trough because I realized it was leaching zinc into the water, which was killing all the invertebrates. And then I realized why people use galvanized steel for outdoor standing water.
[05:54] The zinc kills mosquito larvae. No mosquitoes. While over in this plastic planter that I left out in the rain, there's endless mosquito larvae in here. It's fine if you net them out and feed them to your fish before they can grow up and bite you.
[06:09] Free live fish food. Anyway, when I took the trough out of this system, the water table's ecology started to change. These tiny wild snails started breeding like crazy, and they ate all the gunk and algae.
[06:22] They cleaned every rock, every surface for me. And at the same time, I introduced CO2, so everything started to green. The dark green moss is Java moss, but I do not know what the bright green rafts are.
[06:36] I think that they grew from scraps of hornwort from over in this tank. I think it just has a completely different growth pattern in shallow water with CO2. One other thing that's fun about the water table now is that it rains sometimes, condensation
[06:52] dripping down from these arrowheads above. These are getting much too big, gonna fall over soon. I've phased out fish up here to let shrimp thrive. With endless hiding places, it's kind of ideal for shrimp and for dwarf Mexican crayfish.
[07:08] The big ones tend to crawl out and escape, but the dwarf ones stay put, and they're very happy with all the places to hide and stay out of each other's way in here. They're very territorial with each other, so it's great when everybody has their own little cave.
[07:21] Otherwise, they fight with their little claw hands. Most of the plants in this table are just scraps, by the way. They're trimmings from my other tank that I drop in and I see what they do. It's a ton of fun.
[07:33] The central driftwood there has a million little caves for vampire crabs, which live very happily inside there. That big yellow eye staring right back at you. Here's a phone video of him walking around in the daylight, which is unusual.
[07:48] In the 1980 Flash Gordon movie, there's a monster that lives inside a tree trunk, and men show their bravery by reaching down into the wooden passages and the monster either stings you or it doesn't, like Russian roulette.
[08:01] This stump is my homage to that. Made a big impression on me as a kid. And the big umbrella palm from the metal trough I am repropagating at this end of the table. You plant the fronds upside down in water and they send up a new shoot every time.
[08:17] Quick update on the mangrove tank. the one that has the surface environment that I made out of expanding foam I have not changed this at all no CO2 injection it just grows and changes naturally with the seasons
[08:30] a guppy colony in there has fully reverted to its natural South American coloration after just a few generations without any selective breeding that mangrove tree in the back is doing amazing
[08:43] the other two, not so much no idea why but you see why mangroves are legally protected very, very slow growers. Check out these phone videos from a couple of weeks ago. I walked in and a crayfish was just wandering
[08:56] around on the surface. My favorite thing is when an aquatic creature breaks the barrier between their world and yours. It's like when the girl crawls out of the TV in the rain.
[09:08] You couldn't be in this brain of existence. Go back! Go back whence you came! Check out Riker just chilling in the holodeck over there. Picard is over here materializing on the lights for the cube and of course Beverly is keeping an eye on him like she always does Anyway this is a no tank with poor lighting so most aquatic plants do not work
[09:32] I chiefly keep the water cleaning with this pothos that I let vine up out of it. It's just a house plant with the roots washed off. I also have some of that growing up out of this temporary holding tank for my dwarf puffer fish.
[09:45] It may become permanent for them. Pea puffers from India are my favorite fish, but they love to kill. No snails or microfauna can survive in a tank with these adorable little obligate predators,
[09:59] and so every tank I put them in ends up swamped with algae. You need snails to eat dying leaves and such before they become substrates for algae, so my puffers may live the rest of their days in Bikini Bottom here, where I do not have any fancy plants.
[10:15] I've been building out the hardscape around the greenhouse, and now there's little platforms where I like to peek at fish through the windows. I know you guys think you're hiding in the back, but what if I told you the back has
[10:28] become the front? There's something really surreal about seeing fish this way. It's like looking through a window and seeing outer space or something on the inside. It just ain't right, in a good way.
[10:40] These Tetras are in a tank that I have restarted for the third time. This is my third attempt at growing this basic plant map. I used to have the puffers in here, and the puffers ate all the detrovores that kept it clean.
[10:54] It would look amazing for like two weeks at a time, and then the plants would succumb to algae. With the puffers gone, it looks like third time's a charm. The plants are young, but they are super healthy. That dark, grassy, valcine area in the back corner there
[11:09] should eventually grow long to the surface and kind of drape over the whole aquascape. giving me like a dappled sunlight effect on the carpets below. Those are rummy nose tetras.
[11:22] Rummy nose. My older boy chose them, and he wanted me to show you his air plants over here, by the way. He wove that basket in school. Anyway, aside from their adorable little red noses that look like they've had too much rum,
[11:34] these fish are great because they school so tightly, even when they're not scared. In the world of competition aquascaping, horse-caping, people really like to see a sculptural school of nano-fish, and sometimes you have to
[11:48] scare them to school for the camera, but these guys seem to school out of, like, curiosity. I like them because they remind me that I am also a social organism. As much as I like to think of myself as an individual, I do move with other humans in undulating waves when we step off a
[12:06] train that we're all sharing or when we get in line at the airport. But if you want to see all order break down, just drop in some worms for the rummy noses to eat. Total piranha-like feeding
[12:19] frenzy. Absolute pandemonium. They don't eat like that when there's just one or two of them. They only do that when you have a big soul. One day they're going to drag my arm in with the tweezers. I have some bumblebee gobies living in there as well. I have to drop them food deep in
[12:35] the plants where they don't have to compete to get it. They're so slow and dopey, but they are much more outgoing now that the Tetris have come to live here. Lots of fish species are shy, and they hide until they see other species coming out in the open. That indicates to them that it's safe.
[12:52] So you know how most chef knives are either a German-style knife or a Japanese-style knife, or somewhere in between? Those are the two archetypes at either end of the spectrum. them? Well, in aquascaping, you have the naturalistic Japanese style, and then you have the highly
[13:07] manicured Dutch style. This tank is closer to Dutch style, where you do not allow plant species to mix and mingle. You keep them in large, homogenous groups, which is way more
[13:20] labor-intensive and way less natural, but I just love it. Traditional Dutch aquascaping goes back to the 1930s. It is the classical music of aquascaping. It has many rules, and I am
[13:32] breaking many of them right here. It would be safer for me to call this a garden-style aquarium, which is like freer Dutch style, though my particular approach to it is more like painting than a botanical garden. I want to see people paint with plants more. I call this my
[13:50] Dutch modernist tank. It's got geometric abstraction, big blobs of pure colors. I want to see more of that in aquascaping, so I am attempting it myself. Competition aquascaping is very
[14:03] much about naturalism and Baroque levels of fine detail That is cool but I kind of want to see the exact opposite of that My cube next door is even more modernist Just three big blocks of pure color Sleek simplicity
[14:18] Though I suppose it does have that Japanese natural element with the golden ratio imbalance between the two sides. Anyway, if you want to see a real painting with plants, approach the bathtub after dark. I call this my impressionist tub. In Bloomington, Indiana, there's a restaurant
[14:37] called the Runcible Spoon that's built into an old Victorian house, and in the bathroom, they used to keep a fish in the vintage bathtub. This is my ode to that. Yes, I reinforced the floor with floor jacks. After I filled it up and the floor started sagging, water is heavy.
[14:55] Some of these plants are doing a lot better than others. I'm still struggling to find a lily that will work in that upper left corner there. I want the other lines of plants to look like they're flowing out from under something like a lily, but that one just isn't getting
[15:09] enough light. It will if I can mother it up to the surface. We'll see. R.I.P. George and Gracie, my show quality goldfish that I used to have in the trough in this spot. They both died of
[15:21] apparent kidney diseases, which is common for those inbred freaks. Relatively more natural and more tropical fish like these tetras seem better able to withstand the temperature swings
[15:33] in here. The water gets over 90 degrees Fahrenheit on the hottest few days of summer. These neons are fine with it, but many other fish are not. I still have a lot to learn about fish keeping and aquascaping, but it is fun to finally get good enough at a totally new discipline
[15:50] to where I'm now actually, like, contributing to it a little bit. I go to the conferences, and people know me, not from YouTube. I wrote the cover story in last quarter's Aquatic Gardener magazine,
[16:05] my first print byline in a decade, and I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone do a formally aquascaped container pond like this. Aquascapes are generally made to be viewed from the side. This one is meant to be viewed from an oblique angle
[16:18] because I'm usually standing right here when I look at it. There's areas that are hidden if you look straight on, like in a photo for a competition. With the tub, I love just walking over and looking straight down into it.
[16:32] And it feels very natural to garden by just bending over and reaching down into something. The acrylic tub was cheap, it is light, it's chemically inert, and the sides are really easy to wipe clean with a sponge, almost as if they were designed for that.
[16:47] All I had to do was seal the drains real good. So there's your greenhouse tour number two. Thank you for indulging it, and thank you to Squarespace. A business or an internet following is like a garden in a box.
[17:01] You've got to bring all the elements for growth together in one little place. That's what Squarespace has done. Tell the computer what you're trying to do on the internet. It builds a basic website for you in seconds.
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[17:57] Thank you, Squarespace. And thank you to my local aquarium shops. We have two destination-level shops here in Knoxville, Tennessee. There's Aquarium and Aquatic Marine. I love both of you guys.
[18:09] Thank you to the Aquatic Gardeners Association for providing various forums where I have learned how to do this stuff. thanks to Art Pennum and the gang on the State Crunch message board thanks to Dennis Wong of the Two Hour Aquarius
[18:23] who has helped me a lot through the years same with Alexander Williamson here on YouTube his channel is called Fish-tory what I do about food, Alex does about fish and thanks to you for caring enough
[18:35] to watch until the very end all of us in this hobby have completely exhausted our friends and family and we are desperate for other people to show our shiny glass boxes to. So, thank you.