Fake Or Real Plants

[GhettoFish]

not sure what type of plants to put in a tank which will have black gravel or sand or maybe slate,but the thought of having real plants in the tank just scares me to be honest as i keep thinking its going to be quite hard to take care of them ,so may just have to go fo some of the fake stuff

any suggestions as to what type of plants to go for

 

[kelvinrankin767]

How many watts is your light?
how big is your tank?
Do you have a plant nutrient substrate?
Will you dose with plant ferts?

Plants are easy to grow but if you have low lighting and dont dose ferts and dont have a good substrate plants will be very hard to grow, My tank is 1.1 WPG and i dose with ferts also soon getting good substrate and i can grow cryps, jave fern, jave moss, anibus, moss balls and amazon swords so you dont need the high tech stuff to grow a very nice planted aquarium. just lighting around 1 WPG and dose ferts a sand base would be better to hold the roots in and a plant substratre below that would be even better but not needed.

 

[Smurf]

the thought of having real plants in the tank just scares me to be honest

I had real plants once. They looked great and to be honest, weren't that difficult to keep esp considering I didn't have any lighting to speak of at the time And then I had a plague of snails And I've had fake ones ever since

If you aren't creeped out by the thought of millions of tiny shelled creatures taking over your tank (or have fish that might eat them before they become a problem!) then I think real plants do look better. They "eat" your nitrates too which is always a good thing

 

[gearhead65]

Lots of ways to rid snails. However, I love real plants in my tank. They have lots of benefits too. Check out the planted section. Lots of plants to choose from too.

 

[FishyWishie]

Real plants all the way I have no special substrate (sand only) approx 1.5 watts per gallon (low light) I do however dose TPN+ and EasyCarbo and this is the results (still more plants to come for the left hand side)

Biggest piece of advice I can give is if you have low light like myself research your plant choice and dont buy the bundles you see on various sites a large % of them will die however if you research plants carefully you can have good success by just adding some ferts and liquid carbon.

 

[ellena]

I've tried several methods to grow live plants (except running CO[sub]2[/sub]) with no success.
*Cat litter under sand with daily dosing of TPN+ and easy carbo-too much faff for me and not that spectacular plant growth.
*Pond compost under sand-no growth at all, just steady die off.
*Just sand with some shrimp, amazon sword and anubias-not bad, but it's at work so I don't have to look at it so much.
I much prefer plastic/silk plants. There's none of the rotten mush floating about all the time.
I can keep moss balls alive and have had some success with floating plants which, along with some fake, is an OK compromise for me.
I had a floating plant called something lettuce which was rampant and then suddenly died off in 2 tanks for no apparent reason. I now have something called indian fern which is OK and sprouting on top, but all mushy brown and rotten below