live plants in hard water tanks???

[Magnum Man]

our "native" water here is rock hard... and after beating my head against the wall, for years, I finally installed an RO unit large enough for all my soft water tanks... in the last year or so, I began messing with shrimp, and live bearers, so those tanks vary between blended and straight well water... I've not seen much difference with growing terrestrial plants out of harder water tanks... but I'm also getting more into easy aquatic plants ( anubias ) and I have several varieties... I recently switched over 2 larger tanks, back to hard water, and will be trying to add a few varieties of anubias to those tanks...

curious if anyone has similar plants growing in both hard, and soft water, and notice any difference in how they grow???

 

[Gertrudae]

I do. My tap water has 24 KH and I can use cistern and rain water with 0 to 7 KH.

Usually plants grow better in softer water but some species do well in hard water.
A perfect choice for hard water are allmost any Cryptocoryne, Myriophyllum, Bacopa and some more. It depends on more parameters as hardness; you have to figure out what works best in a given tank.

Anubias, Vallisneria, Egeria and some others also grow in hard water but they proceed bicarbonate-assimilation to compensate low CO2 levels in hard water. That will result in a raising pH value and a hard white covering on their leaves. You can see this especially on leaves near a light source.

There ist a Wikipedia Artikel about this phenomenon but only in German:

Biogene Entkalkung – Wikipedia

de.wikipedia.org

 

[Magnum Man]

this is a starting picture of day one, of a coffeefola, that just got added into a hard water tank, along with several nana's when they get here... I have a really nice coffeefola in a temperate soft water tank, that is growing exceptionally well, so that will give me something to compare to...

also curious if there would be much difference between temperate and tropical temperature tanks?

 

[Magnum Man]

I've had java fern survive in several of my shrimp tanks( I wouldn't say "thrive" though ), for a couple years... but their ugly disposition, could be caused by all the shrimp as well???, and I have a few clumps of unidentified mosses, ( java or similar ) that came in bags of shrimp, and got added to the tanks with them, that are slowly growing over the last couple years

 

[Gertrudae]

Java fern does not thrive here; it never has. This plant requires more potassium than is present in my water. It develops numerous small holes and brown edges.

This is Anubias barteri after I changed the Endler's tank with pure tap water for some times. The pipe to my cistern water is still closed due to the unusual cold weather ...

You can clearly see where there is more light. Young leaves look healthy for a while.

 

[Back in the fold]

Vallisneria is supposed to grow better in hard water and I seem to remember reading something somewhere once , very obscure information , that Vallisneria plants can do something that makes their water harder .

 

[Gertrudae]

Perhaps this meant that Vallis can increase the pH (see bicarbonate assimilation), which normally correlates with hard water.

I think we need to define exactly what "hard water" is. Vallis does not thrive in very soft water with a KH/GH value below about 2, but it does thrive in soft water with an adequate amount of fertiliser.

 

[Uberhoust]

When living in the East Kootenays, our water came from a well and was very hard, don't know the exact value but hard to keep lime stains off of any surface exposed to the water. We had good results with many cryptocorynes and Vallisneria spirallis <sp>. We used 2 48" growlux florescence tubes.