it's been roughly 6 months since I started this project, and I haven't posted any updates. Slow growth is a beautiful thing really, as it's hard for me to wait for results, often times disturbing progress by trying to rush nature. I feel like I've been able to control myself this time around, and the garden is really starting to come together. In some ways, I wish I had a less leafy center piece, it's starting to be almost too bushy, but the ground cover has really started to take off. Over the months
I've added a few new plants and two or three HC trimmings as well. Everything is showing good signs, with very little effort. I basically pour water through the moss twice a month to keep the waterline around 1". sometimes I use fresh water, sometimes it's a cup of tank waste water.
What prompted me to post the update though, was that yesterday I did my 6 month flush. I hadn't planned it, but knew that I would eventually do this. I basically treated it like a circulatory flush, I added water through the moss, while siphoning water out, flushing a lot of debris and silt out from under the stump. It was pretty filthy by tank standards, but didn't smell bad.
The surprise though, was finding a fry of some sort swimming in the moat! It's a bit longer than 1/4" and looks a bit like a lampeye fry, but without lamps... could be that it's too young, could be that it's not a lampeye... if it's from my waterchange water, it's likely to be a lampeye, a clown killie, a cherry barb, or a microrasbora kubotai... but it's impossible to tell yet. It could also, although it's not likely, be some sort of seasonal killie that came as an egg on some fiber or moss or something. We'll see what it grows into. I've never added food of any kind and have really let it just do it's thing, so this is such a surprise.
Unfortunately, these crappy iphone photos don't show the fry, but enjoy the growth!