Experience with Lawn Fertilizer

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I have been using Scotts Liquid Turf Builder in my planted tank along
with Flourish and Flourish Iron. What I found was that too much of it
caused the ammonium and nitrite to spike. The bio-filters took a while
to convert that toxin into nitrate. But I was amazed at how fast the
nitrate was absorbed as soon as they were produced. The plants did
very grow rapidly as a result of the fertilizer. Also, my brownish
slime problem seemed to have cleared up. Incidentally, anyone know
what is the brownish slime?

Despite the spike in ammonium and nitrite for days, I had no fish
death. In fact, I didn't see any significant indication that the fish
were stressed. In fact I had several live bearer births during that
period with many survivors. That was actually very surprising.

Anyway, lawn fertilizer in the planted tank was probably a bad idea.
I'll probably use the rest of that bottle of lawn fertilizer on my lawn
.....

[Allyb]

I tried miracle grow in my tank that had no fish (except for some baby
livebearers that I didn't know were there, which survived the incident).
The plants went wild, but so did the algae. Within a week the tank was
covered with layers of this long stringy insubstantial algae. It was
disgusting. After a couple of 90% water changes the phosphates got back
down to normal, and the algae disappeared, and it may have been a
coincidence, but the beard algae I had been plagued with for many months
(which is what precipitated me just dumping whatever in there) started to
disappear. It's been about a month now, and the only beard algae left is a
little growing on the driftwood. I'd love to know what happened, and if it
was just a coincidence, but either way, I'm so happy that crappy beard algae
is gone!


> wrote in message
ups.com...
> I have been using Scotts Liquid Turf Builder in my planted tank along
> with Flourish and Flourish Iron. What I found was that too much of it
> caused the ammonium and nitrite to spike. The bio-filters took a while
> to convert that toxin into nitrate. But I was amazed at how fast the
> nitrate was absorbed as soon as they were produced. The plants did
> very grow rapidly as a result of the fertilizer. Also, my brownish
> slime problem seemed to have cleared up. Incidentally, anyone know
> what is the brownish slime?
>
> Despite the spike in ammonium and nitrite for days, I had no fish
> death. In fact, I didn't see any significant indication that the fish
> were stressed. In fact I had several live bearer births during that
> period with many survivors. That was actually very surprising.
>
> Anyway, lawn fertilizer in the planted tank was probably a bad idea.
> I'll probably use the rest of that bottle of lawn fertilizer on my lawn
> ....
>

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I think I know what happened. The fertilizer you used has high
phosphate. The Turf Builder I used has a 15:1 N:P ratio. There is a
lawn fertilizer by Scotts called Green Sweep that has no phosphate. In
fact it has nitrate, potassium and iron. That is about as good as it
gets if you don't have to worry about killing your fish. I was not
able to find Green Sweep in my local store. That was why I went with
Turf Builder.