Small Ceramic Pots For Plants

Masami

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Hi,

Just wondered the pro's and con's of continued use of the small ceremic pots and filter wool that small tropical bunched plants come in? They seem quite handy when you are still playing around with the layout of your tank and building up your collection, but I wonder how much they effect the growth or rooting of your plans. I ask as I found my Elodea is not growing in a nice way (thin stems and large space between the groups of leafs).

Out of interest im also using the love fish plant fertiliser weekly as its the only one my local stores stock, is there something better recommended?
 
I try to get them out as soon as possible. What plants do you have? I know things like swords, java fern, and crypts don't like them. But swords and crypts don;t like to be moved, so it could be advantageous to keep them in the pots until your figure out how your are going to 'design' your tank. But on the flip side they do like their roots in rich soil. And java fern, from what i hear; doesn't like it's rhizome burred.

Large spaces in between the leafs means it is not getting enough light (the plant stretches out more to try and get close to the light), at least that's what it means for land plants. Try letting the plant float for a bit so it can grow and be closer to the surface when you re-plant it.

As far as ferts go, stay away from seachem excel as it will kill your elodea, I use seachem flourish. Odds are you won't even need ferts, add some flourite to your substrate. I love that stuff.
 
At the moment I just have a couple of java ferns attached to bogwood, and a few various tropical bunches from my local p@h store, I'm just trying to get everything running nice with the basics before I take the plunge and buy some more expensive plants, but I have small but numerous problems / questions.

All my low plants seem to struggle, the shorter more established elodea are losing colour and starting to look 'furry', I have brown hair algae rapidly growing on my java fern, and the newer plants seem to grow too fast and look thinly spread.

The tank is Fluval Roma 125 which I have bought second hand and has a 24" power-glo and aqua-glo t8 in it which I presume came with it originally as the previous owner has plastic plants I dont think he bothered changing the tube, but did give me a spare marine glo and power glo bulb, but they have also been used. My local p@h store only sell interpret tropical daylight bulbs and I dont want to spend £25+ on new bulbs until I know which are the right ones to get for my tropical fish and plant growing aspirations, i have reduced the lights on time from 14hr to about 10hrs.

I have some nutrafin plant-gro fertlizer, as well as some love fish p@h stuff as well as some seaachem flourish excel on order which I was going to take the ferns out the tank and treat them with to try and get hair algae under control.

Fortunately the fish are all fine so its only my plants I have to worry about (incidentally the fish are 1xbristlenose, 4xcorydoras melini, 6 xray tetra, 4 molly and 1 betta)

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Incidentally I have another tank which is a 70 litre rekord, with a brand new interpet tropical daylight bulb in which I could set up again if I need to treat the plants or experiment around with.
 

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