Dave Millman dav.e.at.tac.tics.co.m wrote in message 4...
I read Walstad's book and got pretty excited about potting soil for my
first planted tank.

Actually, Walstad recommends using soil from your backyard over
potting soil. And she lists quite a few things to be careful about for
potting soil.

Here are some things that the book didn't mention:

1. Soil works great for those folks who never move, remove, replant or add
plants, for as long as the tank lasts. That describes you, right?

I think this is unfair. If you follow her instructions, and cover the
soil with gravel, you'll be OK. It may take a little while for
whatever soil you disturbed to settle back down through the gravel,
but the same could be said of many other substrates.

2. Soil works great for those folks who don't have fish that rearrange
things. Your're not ever likely to have a pl*co, cichlid or loach, are you?

Again, this is true for many other substrates. And my clown loaches
have refrained from "rearranging" things as long as I keep bribing
them with asparagus.

3. Some soil is just plain poison. Seems 5-10-20 years ago, someone
stripped the paint/changed the oil/sprayed insecticide/buried toxins/dumped
a car and engine block/emptied the amphetimine factory onto that piece of
dirt, and you just dropped all that right it into your tank. There's not a
lot of virgin earth around.

I'm sure this is true in some places, but most backyard dirt isn't
chock full of toxins.

My first and only try at a soil tank killed all the fish. There are
probably hundreds of folks out there who have successful soil tanks, but I
suspect the list of failures is larger than the list of successes.

I have heard of dozens of successes (including my own), and very few
failures. Granted, most of the successes were using regular soil
rather than potting soil. In my case, I dug under our backyard sandbox
and thus retrieved soil that had rather little organic material in it.
I felt much safer about that and the unlikely possibility of toxins
than using potting soil and knowing that there were probably weird
fertilizers added.

- Jim