previously i made a very popular video on how to balance a planted aquarium when it comes to
juggling the light nutrients and carbon dioxide or co2 but today let's dive deeper into plant
nutrient deficiencies i want to talk about how exactly did i figure out what nutrients my plants
were missing the exact nutrient test kits i used as well as what is my fertilization schedule today
hi my name is Irene with Girl Talks Fish here with practical tips for busy fish keepers like
you and let's talk about food so when it comes to humans we've got that food pyramid
that tells us you should eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and at the very top you should eat very
little healthy fats for example well plants have a similar thing they need a lot of the
macronutrients like nitrogen phosphorus and potassium and then very few of the you know trace
amounts of the micronutrients now in my previous video on balancing a planted tank i talked about
Liebig's Law of Limiting Factors which basically says the plant growth is capped by whatever
nutrient or factor it is missing or uses up first and therefore there's a couple of schools
of thought when it comes to balancing a tank estimated index or EI dosing fertilization dosing
says okay if plant growth is capped by whatever nutrient it's missing why don't we just flood
the water with tons of nutrients and then we can just worry about tuning the lighting and the co2
amount okay however i would say this method is best for a heavily planted more high maintenance
kind of tank because you're definitely going to be doing weekly large water changes as well as
lots of pruning because you're gonna be growing tons and tons of plants now the other school of
thought is kind of a lean dosing method where okay let's instead set the lighting and maybe the co2
if you're using it at a certain amount and then we're gonna fine-tune the nutrients in order to
balance the tank and we're going to use just the bare minimum amount of nutrients that the plants
need to grow and this method is better for let's say if you have lower light slower growing plants
or maybe your plant your planted tank isn't full of plants yet this leaner dosing might be the way
to go and so since i am a lazy low maintenance kind of girl that's the rot i choose to go with
of course the all-important question you're probably thinking is so where is this plant
nutrient food chart food pyramid that i can use well unfortunately i found a lot of varying
opinions on the internet so i put them all on a chart over here you can check it out and you can
see there's a wide range of parameters of how much phosphorus or potassium etc people think
you should have and i think that is because some of these tanks maybe are more of a low-tech tank
versus a high-tech setting people's water is also different and a lot of times in the articles I'm
reading they don't really specify what kind of tank they're trying to set up so i put
all the information there so we can kind of use that as a guideline maybe uh to try to aim for
so let's rewind back into time and we're going to use my 20 gallon back to basics planted tank as
our case study basically i was sick and tired of having algae and dying plant problems so i reset
the whole tank i use eco complete substrate um ordered the easiest most beginner friendly
plants possible and then the light up here is a fluval 3.0 led which i just found a schedule
online and i copied it now within a few weeks i already had just tons of algae like green hair,
staghorn, black beard... you name it i had it and so we're gonna test it right we gotta
try to solve this problem scientifically so this was the purpose of this back to basics tank now
i had been regularly measuring nitrate levels and it was just consistently always too low no
matter how much fertilizer i put in so i realized the problem was my starting point remember i said
with lean dosing we typically set the light and well for me I'm not using co2 so we set the light
and we leave it well my starting point for the light was way too high so first thing i did was
decrease the light intensity down to 30 percent much dimmer therefore the plants are gonna grow
um not as quickly and therefore they don't need to eat as much and then the second thing was
just continue to dose easy green fertilizer to make sure i have enough nitrate once i started
raising my nitrate levels to appropriate amounts it was amazing the night the algae started going
away actually however the plants still had large holes and leaves which i was really
confused about because hey my nitrate level is good right however remember i said the micro the
macronutrients include um nitrogen phosphorus and potassium right so it's time to get test kits for
phosphate and potassium once i had these two babies yes i determined that although
my nitrate levels were good i actually had low amounts of these two things so
my i figured well i guess my all-in-one fertilizer must not be enough i went ahead and decided to
go down the rabbit hole of dosing individual fertilizers so i got Seachem Flourish Phosphorus
as well as flourish advance which contains mostly potassium but also some other um trace nutrients
as well the immediate effect from that was all my crypts melted away my cryptocorynes which i
was so sad about because i was like hey i adjusted my fertilization schedule so that you guys would
thrive but they're really sensitive to changes in their environment and so they all went away
and really never recovered afterwards which was a bummer but hey you can always buy more
now adding more phosphorus and the flourish advance did seem to help some however i did notice
that the aponogeton, the dwarf aquarium lily as well as the java fern which is supposed to be like
the easiest beginner plant ever they all still had giant holes of them so i changed a few things for
the java fern i found out they actually apparently consume a lot of potassium so instead of using
the flourish advance which has about 0.45 percent potassium i switched to the straight up
flourish potassium which has six percent potassium in it much stronger also for the
bulb plants specifically the dwarf aquarium lily and the aponogeton they just needed more root tabs
i was definitely pretty lacks about how often and how many root tops i would put in there so i just
made a note in my schedule have a monthly reminder go and then made sure to extra pump them full of
um extra fertilizer in the substrate chapter four i know you guys are like this woman cannot
has the blackest thumb ever but i noticed my Pogostemon stellatus 'octopus' was getting like
curled tips to his leaves and so i was like huh i think that's a calcium deficiency problem i
will link this blog post i made for aquarium co-op down in the description but there's kind of some
general pictures that sometimes help anyways what i needed to measure was another water kit this
time for GH and KH i really only care about GH (general hardness) which refers to the minerals in
the water including calcium and turns out it was pretty low i think coming out of my tap water is
about three degrees which apparently was a not enough to keep my plants living so my new best
friend is Seachem Equilibrium minerals which is basically calcium, magnesium, bunch of other stuff
that I'm apparently missing in my water i love it if you have soft water i swear by the stuff
chapter five is a very fond period because ah the plant planted tank ended up maturing
things were stabilizing and i did not have to dose all these individual fertilizers anymore
instead i just had to do my two pumps of the all-in-one Easy Green fertilizer and then anytime
the GH or mineral level went down i would just add some equilibrium such a wonderful time in
my life however the piece was temporary because i made the decision to add platies to this tank
love them however they are livebearers and what do livebearers do? they eat a lot,
they breed a lot, i feel sorry for the fry so i feed them more and what do you know i have a high
bioload situation now chapter six is basically the opposite of chapter one where now my nitrate level
was way too high and i don't want to be doing large weekly water changes remember
lazy person here thankfully the nutrient deficiency i spotted was pretty easy to
recognize which is the pin holes in the leaves and that is generally a sure sign of potassium
uh deficiency so added more flourish potassium and boom as soon as i did that the nitrite level
nitrate level started dropping so this goes back to our Liebig's barrel analogy in that barrel the
plank that was the shortest the new shirt that was missing was potassium and as soon as i added it
all the plants started growing better did i really need to get all those tests
probably not but i felt like it was worth the money at least for me because i really learned
a lot about plant nutrients during that particular saga that i went through i would say nowadays the
tests i actually use would be um multi-test strips which already have i pay attention to the nitrate
and the GH most on this and then that's tested every week i would say if i see a problem with
the plants where they have the large hole problem again i go back to my phosphate and potassium kits
and then i have a few kits that I've basically only used once just to try them out and see what
they were like so that includes we got calcium iron as well as this little co2 kit over here
again uh didn't see anything spectacularly out of range which is why i don't really use them
but yeah as for my fertilization schedule which is my personal fertilization schedule for my
particular tap water the plants i keep et cetera et cetera et cetera i honestly i should make a
flow chart for this but if nitrate is around 10 to 25 ppm i will add some more Easy Green to get that
back up if nitrate is more than 50 ppm and i don't want to get too high i will do some potassium
if my GH is i don't know six degrees or below definitely time for some equilibrium minerals
and then if my ball plants um aren't looking so good or my cryptocorynes have leaves that
are turning yellow definitely gotta have some root tabs so between the four of these things
i am basically able to do no water changes on most of my aquariums like really it's just if
there's evaporation loss i just top it off with tap water and that's it really cool i
hope you guys are able to get there if you are lazy like me if you need to dive into any part
of the planted aquarium like what substrate should i get what about the lining i have a
whole playlist over here of the top five things i wish i had known about these specific parts of
the planted aquarium hobby take time to enjoy your aquariums and I'll see in the next video