Helping a Friend Rescape

This weekend, myself and another GWAPA member helped a third GWAPA member, Paul, rescape his 90G aquarium. Paul has been in the club for awhile, but wanted to make an earnest foray into the high-tech world of aquascaping. He has a nice T5 fixture on order, CO2 rigged up, and replaced his old gravel mixture with several bags of Eco-Complete.

It took us longer than you would think to place eight rocks in the aquarium. We added a rock, stood back and looked, gave directions to the person closest to the tank to move a rock a little to the right or left, and ultimately ended up with the rockscape you see above. You can see a little bit of crayon on the front of the glass because we drew a very minor sketch on the tank beforehand. The crayon wipes right off.

After setting our rockscape, we added another two bags of Eco-Complete to mound up on both sides. Then, we added in a few manzanita branches that Paul wanted to use in the scape. After doing this, we were ready to start scaping. We wanted to to keep a relatively simple plant arrangement for the time-being, so we used a number of lower-maintenance plants, with a couple stems thrown in.

We used Sagittaria subulata and a short Lilaeopsis species in the foreground, with Lobelia cardinalis and Crytocoryne wendtii in the midground, and on the right side background. There’s Echinodorus sp. ‘Vesuvius’ and Ludwigia inclinata var. verticillata ‘Cuba’ in the left background. Overall, I think we were all pretty happy with the scape. Obviously, it needs to do a lot of growing in, but it should fill out nicely. It’s definitely a lot of fun to aquascape with other people!