First time had the pleasure of participating in Wabi Kusa creation organized by the Chicago Aquatic Plants Society in Garfield Park Conservatory. It was a great experience and I just pulled up some old pictures of one of my first wabi-kusa, that later on I flooded with water. Wabi Kusa in short is transitioning plants from submerged to emersed. I put some aquarium substrate mixed up with some additives like bacter AE, regular soil, sand, etc, and tied them up into the plastic mesh. Then you plant it and cover it with the foil. The key is to spray it every day, just so it doesn’t dry out and not more so that it doesn’t create mold. Later on, you make tiny holes in the foil so that more air gets to it in about 2-3 weeks, to slowly reach the point when you are able to take it off. At that moment plants that grew in your aquarium got used to growing above water and you just need to keep spraying it every day. Here is a gallery of my progress at that time. Wabi Kusa is amazing as you can put it back into the water and it starts to grow like crazy. In Asia while doing big aquascapes, they prepare a bunch of wabi kusa in advance, this makes it easy to start off with plants already established in it’s environment.
