Advice

[Feenzo]

Have been keeping fish in my community tank 60*30*45 (71 litres I think )reasonably successfully for the last year and want to expand my reptoire. I have Guppys Zebra Danios Cardinal and neon tetras as well as a cory and clown loach.
Firstly I have a few plants and some bog wood with a gravel base allegedly suitable for plants and want to know if I can introduce a lot more plants without having to start over and clear the tank. Secondly I would love to breed the Danios and am looking for some advice as well as sexing

I am a novice regarding plants and any advice would be welcome

 

[waterdrop]

Hi Feenzo and Welcome to TFF!

Many of the experts in our planted section are quite advanced and it's good to keep in mind that they can sometimes make a topic sound easier than it might in the end feel to you. However, they often do give good tips to beginners in plants and there are certainly some tanks in which raising plants turns out to be quite easy!

One popular approach for beginners is to get their light down around 1.5 watts/USgallon, dose a liquid carbon product such as EasyCarbo or Seachem Excel and dose a nutrient mix (such as TPN+ in the UK (or others in the USA)) followed by a 50% water change on the weekend to remove any excesses of these nutrients and "reset." (This is called "estimative index" (EI) or specifically, reduced EI in the low-light case.)

One way to think about the learning process for the planted tank hobby is to think of lighting as a skill set, Carbon (CO2) as a skill set, Nutrient dosing (the other 16 plant nutrients besides carbon, divided in to macronutrients and micronutrients) as a skill set and finally, Algae control, which is a skill set that depends on some prior knowledge of the first three skills. Light is the driving force of the "rate" at which the entire plant growing process occurs and as such is very important to understand.

There is a broad range of pleasure to be had, from simple plant raising to working on understanding the complexities and hope you will have fun. There are many planted folks here who know a lot more about this than me and I'm sure they'll help you. The PARC has lot's of great reading and will help you focus your questions.

~~waterdrop~~