Our own substrate mix is easy to make as long as we can find the ingredients. This recipe has been created by hobbyists from around the world through time. So here are the main ingredients:

Potting soil
Pottery clay
Dolomite
Potassium chloride
Gravel/Sand

Follow these steps to create the substrate:

Rinse the potting soil thoroughly. This is to get rid of the [...]

First you have to decide if you will keep plants in your tank that need to uptake nutrients through their roots or if you will keep a few “easy” plants or no plants at all. This will affect our requirement for nutrient rich substrate or plain inert gravel. Then you need to decide what kind [...]