I managed to get a few pictures of the native fish that I recently collected from the Potomac River in Virginia. I’m really happy with these fish so far. When I first put them in the tank, they went straight into the plants, not to be seen.

Blue Spotted Sunfish - Enneacanthus gloriosus

Since then, I’ve been feeding them blackworms, and have spent a lot of time in front of the tank, which seems to be getting them used to my presence. The sunnies, in particular, were quite shy to begin with. Now, it’s not unusual to see several of them out and about at the same time.

Blue Spotted Sunfish - Enneacanthus gloriosus

Many of the sunfish have also colored up quite a bit. Some of the younger ones don’t yet have their blue spots, but the older fish are actually quite striking. The little teardrop, or black stripe, under their eye reminds me of Bolivian Rams, Mikrogeophagus altispinosus.

Tessellated Darter - Etheostoma olmstedi

In general, I tend to really enjoy lazy bottom dwellers, and this Tessellated Darter, Etheostoma olmstedi, is exactly that. I love how darters prop themselves up on their front fins, and just sit there waiting for food to come along.

Tessellated Darter - Etheostoma olmstedi

He’s readily accepting blackworms, but even though I’m adding a few pellets with my other feedings to try and get him on commercial food, so far he’s not interested. The Banded Killifish, Fundulus diaphanus, are another one of the fish that are slowly calming down in my tank.

Banded Killifish - Fundulus diaphanus

When I first introduced them, they would often jump from the water when I approached the tank. Now, they’re still staying close to the plant cover, but they’re at least out in the open, while keeping a close eye on me.

Banded Killifish - Fundulus diaphanus

I’ve noticed that they have an interesting mouth that tends to open and unfold a little bit differently than other fish I’ve kept. I presume this is designed to suck surface bugs into their mouths. If I’m ever able to get a picture of it up close, I’ll post it. Overall, I’m still quite pleased with my recent acquisitions. All of the fish appear to be healthy, and should be a nice addition to my tank for some time.

After waiting for some time to finally happen, this week my Swamp Lilly (Crinum americanum) sent up four beautiful white flowers. Very fragrant, the flowers have a pleasant smell that is something like a light woman’s perfume.

The white petals are accented by several bright pink stamen, jutting out from the center. I knew that I could expect a flower soon because my fellow GWAPA member from which I received these plants, said that they usually flower in the July/August timeframe.

Right on cue, the flower stalk appeared last week. Originally, the flower stalk seems as if it would only contain a single flower, but over time, the tip of the stalk reveals four separate flower pods, which in turn contain several petals each.

I haven’t seen any bees visit the flowers yet, but since they’re all throughout my garden, I would expect them to find it soon enough. I’m curious to see whether I can obtain seeds, verses simply propagating the plant by division.

Between the lovely flower and attractive folage, I think Crinum americanum has found a permanent home in my backyard raised brick pond.

On Saturday, a few GWAPA members got together in Virginia along the Potomac River to see what fish we could pull out of the river. Armed with the necessary permits and a few experts in native fish, we started pulling seine nets through some areas near the shore. Most of the shoreline was completely consumed by Hydrilla, an incredibly invasive exotic weed from Asia.

Potomac River, Virginia

Initially, the Hydrilla was way to thick, and besides pulling a few crayfish from the water, we didn’t have a whole lot of luck. We eventually crossed the street, and found a better location a little bit upstream in a creek that feeds into the Potomac.

Large Crayfish

Once we did this, we started pulling out all kinds of fish and critters. By pulling the net through the Hydrilla we were able to target the fish we were interested in, while also doing the river a service by pulling much of the noxious weed from the water and onto the bank.

Fish in Net

The main fish I was interested in finding on this trip was the Blue Spotted Sunfish, Enneacanthus gloriosus, which is a beautiful native sunfish that only gets to 2-3 inches in length. This makes it a wonderful fish for the planted aquarium, as it should not rearrange the tank like some of the larger sunfish, and loves the cover that plants provide.

Blue Spotted Sunfish

We were also hoping to find some snakeheads, not to keep for the aquarium because doing so is illegal, but to see how widespread they really were in the river. Although a bit disappointing to us, I suppose it’s a good thing that we didn’t actually pull any in our nets. Had we found any, legally, you have to euthanize them on the spot.

Banded Killifish

We did get a large number of Banded Killifish, Fundulus diaphanus, which are also good fish for the aquarium. They get to about 4 inches in length, but most of the ones we pulled in were smaller than that. In addition to the killies, we also found one or two darters, specifically, the Tessellated Darter, Etheostoma olmstedi, which are fascinating bottom dwelling fish. I really would have liked to find more of these guys.

Tessellated Darter

Besides the fish, we also pulled in a number of other aquatic creatures, including a countless number of nasty looking bugs, beetles, and dragonfly nymphs. In addition, we got some grass shrimp, Asiatic clams, and all sizes of crayfish.

Asiatic Clam

The area where we found all the fish had a number of aquatic plants including Heteranthera dubia, Vallisneria americana, Myrophyllum, Najas, and a beautifully flowering Lobelia cardinalis. While many aquarists keep the small form of Lobelia cardinalis, you can see that this would be a beautiful pond plant!

Lobelia cardinalis Flowers

With great weather, and a good haul, we had a really great time at the Potomac River this weekend. Huge thanks go to Bob in GWAPA for organizing the trip, and to everyone else for participating. Finally, I want to thank Jeff U for taking fantastic pictures, and allowing me to use them on this website.

Earlier this week, I posted a photographic tour of my garden, but I purposely left out my raised brick pond. That’s not because it’s not doing well, but quite the contrary. The pond is currently overgrown with emersed aquarium plants so it warranted its own post.

Raised Brick Pond - 8/6/2008

The centerpiece plants are two large Crinum americanum plants, which should be flowering quite shortly. They are contained in a single plastic pot of ADA Aquasoil, and surrounding them, I put a smattering of other plants to provide groundcover.

Utricularia graminfolia, Taiwan moss, Marsilea quadrifolia stems.

Utricularia graminfolia is growing emersed in that pot, along with quite a bit of Taiwan moss. I haven’t seen any flowers yet on the Utricularia, but I’m really hoping I get some before the summer is over.

Taiwan Moss emersed

Marsilea quadrifolia is sending up new four-leaf-clovers all throughout the pot. Initially, the new leaves are all folded up in a single leaf, which then opens like origami into the clover.

Young Marsilea quadrifolia leaf

The Marsilea really provides a nice softening effect over the sharp leaves (not literally sharp) of the Crinum. They’re also starting to spread throughout the rest of pond, supported by the frogbite which is now ubiqutous.

Marsilea quadrifolia clover

Also, prevalent throughout the pond, Ludwigia arculata x repens is starting to flower, displaying tiny, but attractive, yellow flowers. Notice how the emersed growth of the Ludwigia has a red stem and green leaves, while submersed this plant usually has dark red leaves.

Ludwigia arculata x repens with flower, over frogbite.

I also have Ludwigia peploides, a native plant to this area, growing in the pond. This Ludwigia doesn’t like to live underwater, as it tries to shoot to the surface when submersed. As such, it’s a perfect pond plant!

Ludwigia peploides

Finally, the water sprite is quite healthy and thriving throughout the pond. I’m a little bit scared to see how big the root system will be when I pull it out in the fall.

Water sprite

When I do that, I’ll probably cram a 20L full of all of these floating plants, and see if I can get some threadfin rainbowfish to breed in the roots. Until then, I’m really enjoying the pond, as a wonderful complement to the rest of my garden.

Despite the sometimes scorching heat and suffocating humidity, this is one of the best times of the year as a gardener. All of the hard work and anticipation that we’ve put into a small plot of land out back, is finally starting to be rewarded. The backyard is green and overgrown, and in-between much of that growth are fresh vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Let me walk you through our garden…

Peppers and Lemongrass

Around our raised brick pond, we have a small bed containing peppers (frying and jalapeno), and one monstrous eggplant. I have one cucumber vine that finally just started to take off after a battle with slugs.

Eggplant

The eggplant is finally ready for harvest, with so many more on the way that I’ll probably be sick of it after 2 months. This particular fruit is destined for Baigan Bhartha, a wonderful Indian dish.

Cubanelle Peppers

Our peppers are doing quite well! The Cubanelle peppers are looking great and the Jalapenos are absolutely exploding! We will definitely not have to worry about the salmonella outbreak on peppers, as we have plenty ourselves!

Jalapeno Peppers

We planted lemongrass this year for the first time, mainly to create a nice backdrop for the pond, but I’m looking forward to using it in some Asian recipes.

Lemongrass

Our tomatoes are currently the biggest disappointment this year. They’re growing, but they seem to be about a month behind schedule for some reason. We support our tomatoes with clothesline, supported by multiple 6-foot poles. We manually feed the vines through the string. By fall, we’ll have a thick 6-7 foot wall of them.

Tomatoes with Amish Squash Creeping Up

While behind schedule, we still have a number of tomatoes forming, so hopefully they’ll come around eventually; horn worms not withstanding.

Unripe tomato

Next to and in front of the tomatoes, we planted three varieties of squash: Amish squash, yellow neck, and black beauty. Somehow, we missed the fact that the Amish variety is a winter squash, that can produce fruits up to 60-80 pounds.

Squash overtaking Okra and Pepper plants.

We’ve got a couple of these giants starting. I’m unsure whether they’ll ever actually ripen, however, as unfortunately, bacterial wilt seems to have afflicted much of the vine.

Amish Squash

The vines, by the way, stretch about 15 feet long, with side shoots spanning the full 4 feet of the bed, and up the fence in some places. I’m not terribly upset that it’s dying back a little bit because it was strangling the rest of the plants in that bed. If anyone has any suggestions on how to prevent/combat bacterial wilt, I would be interested to learn, however.

Squash leaves affected by bacterial wilt.

Coming into the hot weather, our Okra has started to take off. It’s beginning to shoot toward the sky, with our first pod shown below. While I never had Okra growing up, I really love the stuff now, even though it’s admittedly an acquired taste.

Okra pod

In our back raised bed, we have a number of thing going on. The grape and bean vines are clinging to the fence and tripods I’ve setup. We have our evergrowing sage bush in the front left, with some greens in the front right. Carrots, beets, and turnips are behind those things

Back bed: Sage, greens, carrots, turnips, beets, beans, and grapes.

Our first group of beets are starting to pop out of the ground. I’m going to let them get a little bit bigger before picking, but I do want to get a second crop in the ground soon for late harvest.

Beet

We have a number of other herbs growing in our garden, including basil, stevia, oregano, rosemary, thyme, catnip, mint, chamomile, and dill. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little tour of our garden. We definitely love this time of year!

Updated June 4, 2012: Thanks to Bart to correctly identifying as Tobacco Horn Worm. Text corrected

I was out in my garden, and I noticed that a few of my tomato plants were nearly stripped bare of their leaves. I had noticed a few branches like this the other day, but couldn’t find the perpetrator. Well, I finally found the bugger — a rather large tobacco horn worm

Stripped tomato branch

Rather than simply plucking the large caterpillar from the vine, and “removing” him from my garden, I had to do a photo shoot with him first. I’ve been quite fortunate in the past to not have to deal with many of these worms, and the ones I did were usually invaded by wasp parasites.

Tobacco Horn Worm, backend

I didn’t realize at first that the horned part of the caterpillar is not their head. They have some incredibly convincing eye spots and markings to make it appear like they’re something you don’t want to mess with.

In fact, their head is the other end, which is much less intimating. They’ve got three sets of legs or feelers up front that help them to navigate the branches of my poor tomato plants.

Tobacco Horn Worm, full body shot

Overall, their body stripes and coloration really make these attractive creatures. This particular fellow did a number on 2-3 of my tomato vines, but I’m hoping that they’ll rebound, despite already being a little bit behind this year. Does anyone else have any experience with the horn worms, and know how to keep them away in the future?

Yesterday, I went with a couple friends out to survey what native aquatic plants are growing along some portions of the Patuxent River in Maryland. I like to do this every once in awhile because each time you go, you’re likely to find something different. In addition, from year to year, certain plants may exist in huge patches, while the next year, they’ll be quite sparse. Finally, if I ever get around to setting up a tank to mimic my local habitat, it’s good to know what the local habitat consists of.

Lake off the Patuxent River

We visited a lake that is part of the Patuxent watershed. The lake itself is covered with tons of lily pads, which during this time of year were flowering quite nicely. This trip, we saw both white and pink flowers. I didn’t know that the pink flowered lilies were native — perhaps they’re not?

Lily pad, with flower

All along the banks, hairgrass, likely Eleocharis parvulus, carpeted the lake bed. Of course, there was also several giant hairgrass species as well.

Hairgrass, probably Eleocharis parvulus

In several places, amoungst the hairgrass we found a flowering bladderwort, which could be Utricularia gibba. Although the yellow flower is pretty, this is definitely a native plant that I would not want to keep in my tanks. Often found as a contaminate on plants that you buy, this carnivorous plant is much like hair algae in its invasiveness of your aquarium.

Utricularia sp. flower

All throughout the area, Ludwigia palustris could be found. This is one of the nicer local native plants that is an excellent stem plant for any type of tank. We were talking yesterday about how surprising it is that Ludwigia repens is the most widely sold plant from its genus, but that L. palustris is smaller leaved, and thus probably more suitable for a wider variety of aquariums.

Ludwigia palustris

One of the other surprises that we saw yesterday was this patch of Brasenia schreberi. Everywhere else throughout the lake this plant sent small 2-3″ pads to the surface. Within the cracks of the boat ramp it looked like this, staying completely submersed. That brings up the question as to why? My theory is that due to being on the boat ramp, it is occasionally trampled, and thus is being trained to stay short, like a Red Tiger Lotus can be trained in our aquarium. It’s also possible that it’s just stunted due to the limitations of living in a crack between the boat ramp’s cement tiles.

Brasenia schreberi

Another plant that could potentially be suitable for aquarium use is Lindernia dubia. Currently, I don’t think it is being produced by any of the large aquatic plant nurseries, but this is a nice stem plant. We found it growing both submersed, and emersed with flowers, as shown below. (I like the dragonfly too!)

Lindernia dubia

One of the more interesting plants that we have locally is Proserpinaca palustris, or Mermaid Weed. Emersed, the stems look like a Rotala with serrated edges, but submersed, the leaves become quite tooth-like and bright red. I’ve never kept this plant myself before, but I understand it’s a fairly difficult plant to grow in the aquarium. This is probably why it’s available, but not commonly traded among aquarists.

Proserpinaca palustris (Mermaid Weed) with Brasenia schreberi

We saw a few plants that we couldn’t identify, with the most interesting being this plant below. At first glance, we thought it might be an Eriocaulon sp., but the bulbs on this grass are wrong for that. It’s probably just a stunted giant hairgrass, but wouldn’t it be fantastic to find a grass plant that stayed this size underwater? (Updated: a reader identifies this as Xyris caroliniana.)

Probably Xyris caroliniana, unsuitable for aquarium use

Now that I’ve mentioned what we did find, we were surprised that we didn’t find any Lysimachia (Creeping Jenny) or Rotala ramosior. Both of these plants are excellent aquarium plants, and usually present in some quantity locally. Additionally, there were a number of Polygonum species around, but I didn’t get any pictures of those. Despite incredibly hot and humid weather, we had a really good time, geeking it up, exploring our local waterway. Lastly, I need to stress that whenever you go out in your local habitat, do not collect plants from protected areas. If you are in an area where it is legal to collect, only take a stem or two, and grow it out in your aquarium. Never take a plant if it is the only one in the area. Be responsible!

On Saturday, GWAPA brought Luis Navarro all the way from Houston, TX to do an aquascaping demonstration at our monthly club meeting. I was fortunate to have some time to hang out with him on Friday evening after picking him up from the airport. He’s a really talented and knowledgable aquascaper, so just to talk plants with him was an honor. Prior to the start of the meeting, a few of us gathered at Francine’s house to prepare the 125G aquarium that Luis was going to aquascape. We also had to get the plants he wanted to use ready, which involved tying anubias to small rocks, breaking up Marsilea minuta into small plugs for easy planting, and such.

Around 1:00pm, members started arriving, and by 2:00pm we had almost 30 people packed into Francine’s basement. Everyone was very interested to watch Luis work. He answered a number of questions, and proceed with the aquascape. After about an hour, he had completed this rock scape using Marsilea minuta, Anubias barteri var. ‘nana’, Cryptocoryne crispatula var. balansae, and Vallisneria nana.

Francine's 125G, Scaped by Luis Navarro.

After the demonstration, we held our auction, which consisted of nearly 100 bags of plants for sale. I came away with a number of items this month, including Rotala verticillatus, Rotala sp. ‘Green Narrow,’ Nuphar japonica, Potamogeton gayi, an assortment of other plants. I also was happy to have some other plants on my doorstep when I got home, including Juncus repens, Limnophila sp. “mini”, Hygrophila difformis “variegated”, and Hemigraphis traian. I barely had room for all of that stuff in my tanks! Thanks GWAPA for another great meeting!

It’s time that I post an updated picture of my 75G tank. (Previous version here.) Besides my recent disaster with not quarantining fish, I haven’t worked too much on this tank. I removed one of the pieces of driftwood in the front middle to make the scape flow a little bit better. The Blyxa japonica in the front right has grown by leaps and bounds. The Eleocharis sp. ‘Japan’ has grown, but not filled in near as full as I’m hoping for in the left foreground. Otherwise, in the back-right I’ve removed all of the Pogostemon stellatus and put Ludwigia glandulosa in its place. I still have a stem of Ludwigia sp. ‘Cuba’ back there, but I’ll likely move that to my 40G tank once it has stabilized. I’ve also added Hygrophila corymbosa ‘Kompact’ to the midground-center.

75G - July 24, 2008. Click for larger image.

I’m working to fight off a minor black brush algae attack that I believe was caused by medicating the tank. Otherwise, it’s growing fairly well. I looks a little bit unbalanced now with the hairgrass being so sparse, and the empty background on the right side, but once those plants fill in, I’ll be fairly happy with it. I’m open to comments and critiques, however. 🙂

From Bailin Shaw of the Aquatic Gardener’s Association:

Fellow aquascapers, it’s that time of the year again! Time to tidy up the tanks, finish growing and grooming the plants, and time to make the final preparations before you snap the pictures for the annual Aquatic Gardeners Association International Aquascaping Contest. With this year’s convention being held in Atlanta, Georgia, your tank might be one of the winning aquascapes to be presented at the awards banquet. As in past contests, each aquascape will be judged by an esteemed panel of judges, and this year is no exception. Deadline for entry of a tank will be September 15 to allow ample time for judging prior to the convention.

I look forward to another exciting year of new and unique aquascapes.

Kind Regards,
Bailin Shaw
Aquascaping Contest Chair

So what are you waiting for? Prepare your tanks, and submit them for the contest!