Chelating agents, or you can buy them premixed. Chelating basically makes the nutrients more bioavailable
and more stable, because certain metals, like Fe (Iron) will react with water and quickly become insoluble. The
Chelate keeps them in suspension where they can be used by plants. It also reduces the toxicity of certain
metal ions because they are no longer reactive and wont bond to sites they shouldn’t in your fishes body.
Often the limiting factor on aquatic plant growth is CO2, which means that your fish simply cant provide
enough CO2 for the plants to use up all the nutrients and as such, the plants will be out competed by algae,
this is a common case and will usually require reduction of nutrients, reduction of light or CO2
supplementation. This can take the form of Compressed CO2, DIY CO2 and dissolved organic carbon
supplementation. Dissolved organic carbon supplementation are products like Seachem Flourish excel, Dino
Spit (available from Aquagreen) and if you are into DIY, apparently Glutaraldehyde mixes can provide plants
with carbon.
A couple of short things.
Mixing your own fertiliser is for people that have a better grasp of chemistry in the aquarium and have test
kits that allow them to monitor the nutrient levels.
Dosing individual nutrients is even more difficult and should only be attempted by people that are certain they
know what they are doing and are able to test the nutrient levels in the tank. There is a huge advantage in
doing this though, as you can change fertilisation based on the nutrient deficiency symptoms/test results.
I don’t know the ideal levels for nutrients, these have to be looked up on the forum or on Google as they will
vary wildly for different types of plants, and mostly because I simply cant remember the standard
accepted values (to be honest, not even sure if there are any accepted values).
And there it is, I think I got everything. I will be editing this in the future.
Hopefully this is helpful to someone. Also please, don’t copy this to other forums, if I like the
forum enough I may post it there eventually, but it took me over 5 hours to write, so id like it to stay in the one
place. And clearly, i did miss some parts, i will edit this in the future and make it a bit easier to read and a bit
more informative.
Cheers,
Chris
Still needing more chemistry? Of course you are! Check out the article on Ammonia in the
freshwater aquarium in the Members Articles Section of the the CDAS Web Site