plant discovery

[TankWarrior]

I was digging through some old pics and found a couple of before and after shots of a 60 gallon setup I had years ago. The first photo is when I initially added the Aglaonema plants. I was doing weekly 50% water changes at that time. The second photo is about a year later. By then, I'd stopped changing the water and just replaced the evaporated water with distilled. I'd feed the fish as normal and tend to the plants. The result was the fish living in nearly nitrogen-free water without regular water changes. The plant roots were constantly removing nitrogen from the fish waste. Of course, this type of setup isn't feasible nowadays. Distilled water is way too expensive, and I was going through gallons of it weekly due to evaporation from the open tank. One other thing to note - the Ag plants eventually blocked out the light, causing the Anacharis to die off. But the Anubias stayed pretty healthy.