When To Start Fertilizing?

[kathleen]

Hello, I'm in the process of cycling (fishless) my 50g. I have recently added a dozen plants and my tank should be ready for fish in about 7-10 days. I have a low light set up (1.5 WPG), no CO2 and the plants are planted in pockets of flourite with the rest of the substrate being regular aquarium gravel. The plants I have are anubias, crypts and swords. I have on hand Flourish and Flourish Excel. When should I start using these?

 

[kathleen]

bump )

 

[zig]

Sorry Kathleen i meant to get around to answering this.............i would feed them as per the instructions on the bottles straight away, there is no need to wait, this is a bit old school where it used to be said you should wait a month etc before feeding, but if you think about it why starve the plants! so anyway current thinking is to feed the plants straight away there is no reason to wait.

The Amazon swords you have are root feeders so may need some tabs buried in the substrate beside them, also the Anubias should be attached to rocks or bogwood with some cotton thread, the roots will eventually attach themselves, the roots or rhizomes of these plants should not be buried in the substrate or they will eventually rot.

 

[kathleen]

Thanks for the reply zig, I appreciate it!. It dropped off the first page so I thought I would give it a bump.

So the excess nitrate from cycling doesn't matter? My anubias are tied to my bogwood but the white roots really stand out against the darkness of the wood. Maybe once they get more established they won't be so noticeable. I was wondering about root tabs so I think I'll go ahead and pick some up. You just have to be careful not to disturb them when vaccuming, right?

eta - just read the info for the Flourish Tabs and they contain no PO4 or NO3 so they should be what I'm looking for, no?

 

[zig]

The excess nitrate wont matter the plants need nitrate they use it as fertiliser, long term in a low light tank the fish food and waste will provide nitrate and phosphate which the plants both need (again old school thinking that these are pollutants in planted tanks...the plants need them) so along with the liquid flourish you wont need much else, the addition of the Excel will make a big difference to the growth of the plants you will definatly see a big difference using it as opposed to not using it.

The flourish root tabs will be fine just bury them deep into the substrate, the roots of the Anubias will darken within a short time and will be less noticeable.

Good luck with the tank