Fertelizer

[slowlyburn]

I am very new to plants. I have a 10 gal moderately planted. It has maybe 12-13 plants. I'm using 2 Phillips PC 6500k 15w each bulbs. My water from the tap is around 7.2ph and my tank with c02 stays around 6.5ph. My Nitrates used to be around 15ppm when I had no plants and now its around 5ppm.
My question is do I need more nitrates in my tank?

I bought 4 different fertelizers-----------V
Iron Chelate 10% (1ml/20g = .1ppm iron)
Potassium k2s04 (1ml/20g = 1ppm potassium)
Phosphate kh2p04 (1ml/20g = 1ppm phosphate and .41ppm potassium) and I got a bottle of Flourish. How much? How often? Do I need more or less of what I have? This guy who sold me all this stuff, was telling me all this info all at once, and it was tough to catch it all. I hope this all made sence to someone.

 

[TKOS]

Basically you will want to keep the nitrates, phosphates and potassium in a balance of 10:1:10. So 10 ppm of nitrates 1 ppm of phosphates and 10 ppm of potassium would be fine. Do some reading on EI or estimated index. The thought there is to dose over the period of a week enough ferts that your tank never runs out of any. This will almost definitely create an excess of nutrients. This is dealt with by a 50% water change once a week. Now this is all very general and each tank and person is different but that is the starting point.

I would aim for the lower of 10 ppm ratio in that small of a tank to start. If the plants are using it up really fast then up it to 20 ppm ratio.

 

[fresh_newby]

go to these two websites to read up


www.rexgrigg.com

www.barrreport.com