Soil and hardscape preparation

I setup my 240L aquarium over a week ago. During the setup I made few photos of the preparation process. I started with soil, I used ADA Tourmaline BC, ADA Power Sand Special and ADA Aquasoil. First I spread Tourmaline BC on the bottom. Tourmaline is a mineral compound that looks like a black dust. It is released slowly and is electrostatic which invigorates bacteria that leaves close to the bottom in the soil. I did choose for a small path in 2/3 of the width of the aquarium, so I made sure to not put any soil there. I'll fill it later with sand. On the Tourmaline I did put around 5L of ADA Power Sand Special. I made a thicker layer where plants will be planted and almost nothing in front where it will be mostly covered by stones and wood. Power Sand Special is nutrient rich soil, kind of a garden soil, with small stones. There are different sizes of Power Sand: small, medium and large.You use it according to the size of your aquarium. In my 120cm tank I could use large or medium. In my case I had medium size. The size corresponds to the size of the stones. The stones allow for better water flow and it allows for making sure that anaerobic conditions will not easily occur. Here is the look after puting a small layer of aquasoil amazonia (new) on top of power sand. Power Sand is visible on the right hand side, left side has a cover of aquasoil on it.  

I scaped a little road, the front of the aquarium will also be filled with decorative sand. The Aquasoil should be kept moist, and it should not be left there to dry so I was watering it a bit, you can see the dark patches on it, this is the color it will have in water: very dark brown. 

When I did put the first layer of the soil in the tank, it was time for hardscape, I started with roots, as they are the skeleton also for plants. I did not plan to put many big stones, only some to make the transition between sand and planted parts more natural. I kept the proportions like 1/3 to 2/3 for the wood. I used branch wood, it is very usefull if you plan to put lots of plants attached to wood like Microsorium or Anubias. Here is the left hand side view after looking for good composition (3 different roots combined). 

And here is the right hand side. - three roots combined as well. the bottom part will be used as a skeleton for Anubias. The exposed cuttings of the wood, will be covered by plants and stones, so will be invisible for the viewer after some time.

Here is how the setup looked like when I finished setting up wood. 

When it was done I started the lengthy planting process. I had to attach around 50 plants to wood and rocks, moss to wood and plant the background. When I had all the plants attached to wood, I put the wood once again inside, this always imposes some changes in the initial design. I did put additional Aquasoil to fill in the gaps and scape a slope on the back side to expose the stem plants a bit higher behind the wood. During this process I found some other way to arrange the wood, so you can see on the picture below that the end product looked a bit different than initial scape, but the general framework is same.

Small stones cover the wood as well to keep it from getting to the surface. Branch wood will need some time to make it soaked enough to not have the willing to fly away. After some time I will remove those stones. After setup was ready I attached my two filters, one of them has full biological setup, other one contains active carbon as well to clear the water from all the chemicals etc. that could be present in wood and on the plants. It will also help to reduce colorization of water by the wood in the initial stage. This carbon will be removed after 3-4 weeks and will be replaced by biological media. CO2 was started with 2 bubbles per second. I will not fertilize the water for the next two-three weeks because if you are using Aquasoil and Power Sand a lot of nutrients will be released initially to the water column. Also what is expected in that setup is that NH3/NH4 will rise in the initial week or two, so I was making water changes every day, than every second day. Finally after three weeks the schedule should change to changing water once a week. On day 9th I had NH3/NH4 level around 1mg/l, NO2 already is balanced to 0mg/l and NO3 went down to 10mg/l. (After two days levels were: NH3/NH4: 8mg/l, NO2: 5mg/l, NO3: 120mg/l).