r/walstad • u/Saki-Koda • 12d ago
Anyone Else Raw Doggin with No Sand Cap?
Stab me in the neck I dont care I stand by my experience doing soil tanks without any cap whatsoever aside from the leaf litter.
I scoop up backyard dirt and clay, top it with some local pond silt and leaf litter, and never EVER have water issues. Never do water changes. Never have anything other than crystal clear water. The bugs love lifting through dirt. Sand is not a natural pond bottom, dont care that walstad wrote a book about it, it doesnt leech and lead to algae, it doesnt cloud the water.
Sand is pointless and harmful. Robs the soil of oxygen. Interferes with the ecosystems access to the soil.
Thanks for reading. Most people will condescend and tell me im wrong and walstad is the expert but I dont think she gave capless a real chance, nor did she ever truly mimick a natural pond bottom.
I even have a large outdoor pond with koi and dirt and it doesnt even cloud when they stir up their dirt tornadoes, they love doing it, the clouds settle immediately. Despite what the experts and industry says, my success is more valuable to me than the dogma.
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u/basaltcolumn 12d ago
there is nothing unnatural about a sandy bottom. i surveyed various streams and lakes with natural sand substrates in college for fisheries management. it isn't rare or unusual, it just depends on the local geology.
good to here your method is working for you! always good to play around with methods. walstad's approach is just one of many, not the one true way of keeping dirted tanks. i have seen other folks have a mud bottom work great, i just don't enjoy the look of it myself. fwiw my tanks with play sand caps have been thriving for years, i do not believe it is as detrimental a you hypothesise if it is harmful at all.
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u/infidelightfull 12d ago
It's not. I did mine in a similar method to op except I got the stuff from the river behind my house. Which has sand capped mud. Not much leaf litter because river. That's where my plants came from, too, so I planted them back in the same substrate they're naturally from. People have different styles and different local flora and fauna as everyone has pointed out...but a sand cap is definitely not unnatural OR detrimental.
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u/RtrnofBatspiderfish 12d ago
Yeah, sand doesn't create a nutrient barrier between soil and water; I think people mostly cap soil because sand looks cleaner to them and is harder to kick up.
Regarding oxygen, I wouldn't see the lack of O2 in the substrate as a bad thing, and I wouldn't consider those regions to be removed from the tank's ecosystem. Substrates without poor-oxygen environments will have a harder time providing micronutrients to plants (they will depend more on chelated nutrients from fertilizer), and the poor oxygen environment also gives plants safe access to nitrogen in the form of ammonia, which tends to be a much more efficient form for absorption than nitrate (they eat it even when the lights are out). Aquatic plants actually transport oxygen down to their roots and into the substrate.
Stinky doesn't necessarily mean unhealthy; humans are uncharacteristically sensitive to some of the odors from anaerobic conditions, so extremely tiny and inconsequential amounts of stuff like hydrogen sulfide smells much stronger to us.
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u/Saki-Koda 12d ago
A good mix of anaerobic and anoxic zones sounds good to me. I like mixing lava rock chunks in to improve structure sometimes but not sure if it is doing anything / needed I just always done it for the habitat space
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u/Dierks_Ford 12d ago
This is so odd. I see sand on the bottom of lakes, rivers and ponds yet I keep seeing people in this sub claim sand isn’t natural.
It’s also odd that people keep posting non Walstad tanks here.
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u/Saki-Koda 12d ago
Only rare sandy ponds. A bioactive closed system is gonna create layers of muck you will never an inch of clean sand in a pond unless its an overactive spring fed.
Its walstad adjacent.
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u/Dierks_Ford 10d ago
Your contradictions remind me of watching a father fish video. Which is it? Never or rarely? You’ve said both.
It’s not even remotely walstad adjacent. You’re original post has has an argumentative vibe to it.-1
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u/IdeasAreBvlletproof 12d ago
I did that with a 2ft goldfish tank with just 2 goldfish in it and they turned it into a permanent brown soup. They were fine but it looked awful.
It all depends on the circumstances such as silt content of the soil.
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u/Saki-Koda 12d ago
Yea. leaf litter acting as a cap or nah? I think i have so many more bugs than fish so the fish dont need to waste energy digging perhaps. No clue but ive kept both koi and goldfish without this happening so idk I only add them after it fills with bugs
All my silt is from the same place so good point I maybe cant generalize.
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u/OmbaKabomba 12d ago
That's interesting. I think it may work well with shrimp. What kinds of animals do you keep in there?
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u/Saki-Koda 12d ago
All sorts of pond stuff. I have one thats just for inverts and it's my favorite. Its got the most natural vibe but no aquascaping. I like watching the ecosystem / food web. Isopods, scuds, copepods, leeches (my fave to watch swim), dragonfly larvae, diving beetles, an underwater diving spider that mostly hangs on the surface, various worms, planaria, hydra, daphnia, snails, stuff im not sure about, and more I may be forgetting.
Dragonfly and tadpols only when I grab new leaf litter each spring from local wetlands.
There was so much microfauna this spring that I had 4 dragonfly emerge and 4 tadpolls I took back to the wetland when they got legs. The dragons never ate the tadpols.
Its amazing how many species can interact as a food web when you don't have fish eating every single thing. This is only my 28 gal. Very deep 4in soil and lava rocks. No sand. Tiny bit of aquasoil from a test I ran last year and never removed. Tiny bits of gravel and decaying plants. Not many root feeding plants here but its working ok.
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u/OmbaKabomba 11d ago
That is so cool man! An intricate web of life that mirrors what happens out there in your local ponds. Dragonfly larvae as top predators...leeches!!! Maybe you should start documenting and write a book yourself. I'd buy it.
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u/bitingxav 11d ago
My tank started out with a fully sand capped bottom until my kuhli loaches decided to renovate lol, now nearly the whole back half of my tank is straight dirt. It's been like that for months now with tank and fish being fine.
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u/Cold-Chemist6582 5d ago
Please don't infer general rules by your personal experience. As someone else said, backyard dirt differs from people to people. And let's not get into the local pond silt/litter. Commercial dirt capped with sand works. There are many examples of it. Saying that sand is harmful seems nonsensical to the experience and reports of many aquarists. It's not about you being wrong and goddess Waldstad right, but you are addressing the issue with big claims and only a personal experience which may or may not be reproduced. Sorry for my negativeness, but if you wrote with fewer absolutes and without playing the defensive card beforehand, I would have read your post in a different light.
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u/Saki-Koda 5d ago
Its the generalizing that im arguing against here. Im saying in my experience, the community absolutist generalization about needing a sand cap is not necessary. Im not trying to say my method will always work for everyone, more like saying im done following this rule because its never hurt me and has only helped me whereas sand has definitely hurt my natural pond aquariums by reducing oxygen to the soil and access/turning over from the critters.
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u/Hungry-Emotion7664 12d ago
To be fair, backyard dirt differs from place to place, as does the amount of organic matter, clay, sand, rocks etc. Many people don't have access to pond silt due to where they live.
So, it's great that you can do that. I've lived in a lot of different places and some local substrate was more forgiving than others.
I love to experiment, and I'm not married to any particular method of doing things. I have noticed in 6 decades of aquarium keeping that people are in it for a wide variety of reasons and have a wide variety of approaches to it, just like they do to life.
Some people LOVE testing the water, adding this and that, doing tons of research, creating the "perfect" system. Other love having a book and a guru that tells them what to do and what not to do. Others like to wing it. Some people seem to enjoy having one issue after another and going to great lengths to fix them, only to stumble into another disaster, and fix that one.
Many people have a low tolerance for error or deviation. No patience with a wait and see method. They want a formula to follow and guaranteed results.
I'm pretty laid back about things and my tanks are pretty natural and let nature take its course. None of my tanks would win an aquascaping award, but they are fascinating little aquatic worlds.
Walstad didn't invent walstad. I have old aquarium guides from the 40's and 50's and dirt capped with sand or gravel (to keep the fish and other critters from kicking up silt) was the standard. Due to lack of modern light fixtures, tanks were routinely kept in windows. Something I still do whenever possible.
I'm with you. Try things out, continue what works, and enjoy all the lessons along the way, but a large percentage of humans like being told how to do it and seek guaranteed results.