Just Set Up My Little Phyto And Zoo Plankton Farm

[dannywrc]

Decided to have a go at this as i wanna keep the tanks diet as natural as possible and i really want a manderin.

the wife had a shoe rack in the outhouse which looked perfect to use for culturing :whistling:

i removed the middle shelf and attached mylar to the back and side. i fitted an 18w 6500k tube to the underside of the top shelf. the front curtain was made from a bin bag... edges cut and taped to firm it up a bit.

i used ro water at 1.019sg and sat two bottles in a dish of water heated to 20 degrees as the outhouse gets pretty cold. used a small airpump and ran an airline into a gangvalve and then to the bottom of each container.

in the first container for the phyto i added half a bottle of **'s, 5 drops of miracle grow and 5 drops of salifert trace soft (optional)

the second bottle i added zooplankton mix and a squirt of the remaining phyto so they could eat.

light cycle seems to be ok at 10 hours a day. meant to be 16 i think. the phyto is darkening and is grouping at the bottom of the bottle. the zooplankton looks very active too so hopefully in a weeks time i will get my first harvest.

 

[rdp50734]

fingers crossed for you!

 

[ben1987]

Looks neat, plenty of room if it does take off too

 

[dannywrc]

cheers. was gonna split them into larger containers if this lot goes well. checked the phyto and its noticeably darker than yesterday. must be going through a mass reproduction phase

 

[dannywrc]

got my first harvest of zooplankton on friday, got quite a bit in just 1/3 of the tub. the phyto looks almost ready too

 

[ozzie2011]

That looks a really good colour Danny for 'homebrew', usually much lighter.

Good Job

 

[kj23502]

cool

 

[dannywrc]

thanks

do you think its ready to use now or should i give it a little longer? really not sure when to split it. read between 3 and 4 weeks.

 

[GGtank]

Great thread!
Is it just plain garden shop miracle grow that you dosed?


Keep up the good work!

Rhy

 

[dannywrc]

cheers

yeah just a small bottle, only cost a few quid.

 

[Harry1996]

How hard is it to culture phyto? Because im thing of culturing copepods,rotifers and phyto some time.

 

[dannywrc]

pm'd you a link for phyto culturing harry. definitely worth doing. iv switched mine off now. the tanks got thousands of pods n rotis in there and iv got 2 ltrs of phyto to last a couple of months.