Amazon Sword Runners

[blinky000]

I bought 2 ginormous amazon swords about 6 weeks ago (£1.75 each. Bargain!) and over the past month or so, they've both sprouted runners that are now so long that they hang over the sides of the tank. At a few points along the runners, there are some little plants developing but at what point do you remove the runner, or the daughter plants?

 

[CrazyAirborne]

can u take pics? im really curious what this looks like, as i have a HUGE sword that sent out one lone shoot straight up, but never did anything from there.

 

[Wills]

I had a huge Sword for about 2 years that sent out shoots and huge clusters of daughter plants but they never seemed to get proper roots. I took some pics once and someone warned me that these big shoot systems takes energy away from the mother plant and the mother plant goes straggly and this is exactly what happened to me and I lost the plant in the end I couldnt get the leaves to come through and my Severum was eating the new small leaves so I would be tempted to cut them off.

 

[blinky000]

The leaves have started to die one by one on the mother plant but no worse than if you move it from one tank to another. The majority of the daughter plants haven't grown roots yet but the biggest one has. I looked closer and it's actually two daughter plants and one single root that I have now separated. It seems to be doing really well (when the corys aren't uprooting it!).
Here's plant 1:

Plant 2:

Close-up of a daughter plant:

And a new generation has begun!

 

[BigFairy]

yeah just leave them, they will grow into new plants, with roots etc and eventually the runners themselves will just detach themselves.
just keep them underwater, and try and get them close to the gravel so when the roots grow they can start rooting.

I had around 10-12 new plants sprout from 2 runners from a single plant at the same time.

 

[tanksalot]

I tend to treat my aquatic plants as if they were terrestrial a lot of the time, and with my Amazon sword runners, I did what I would do with a strawberry plant runner ie. weighting it down to the ground:

I did three of the plantlets like that. The others I cut off and tried planting one in another tank with (seemingly) better conditions - more light, ferts and CO2. Not a very good scientific experiment I know, but what I found was that those I left attached to the mother plant grew much more quickly and strongly than the one I'd detached and grown separately, so if I were to grow swords again, that's probably how I'd go about propagating them. I left them attached until the new leaves were about 6 inches long, then removed them.

 

[blinky000]

Brilliant, thank you I'd been saving the weights that came with the swords for something, now they finally have a use lol