Plants in Aquariums

We were at one of our local Pet Supplies stores recently. Not a PetCo/PetSmart, not that I have nothing against them, just this local supplier can do better deals on Blue Buffalo and Wellness pet food than I can get at PetCo. I asked the cashier if they carried live plants for aquariums, because I hadn't seen any plants and their fish section was quite small (they don't actual stock animals, just the supplies, feed, etc.) They didn't but she did tell us that there was an aquarium store just up the road.

How we didn't know about it before I don't know, because it was huge! At first I thought it was a pet store because it was so big and it was called PTF Pets (PTF = Pasadena Tropical Fish, btw), but inside were wall-to-wall tanks of fish. But not just fish; crabs and other marine critters and even some strange things that looked like 5-legged Octopus...would that make them Pentapusses? Pentapie?

I asked the lady running the show about plants and she escorted me to a tank with a dozen or so plants floating around the bottom (are they still floating if they're at the bottom?) and I picked out a couple of lively looking sorts (Narrow Leaf Chain Sword, and Red Wendth), then asked her about the proper method of installing them in my tank, because I'd put plants into my tank before which had not survived. Then again, that was probably a combination of the Snail infestation that came along with them, and me being a Noob and not following SOP for planting aquarium plants.

Growing out of the bottom of one of the pots were these lovely long roots and yet when I asked the lady about how to plant the plants she recommended I cut those lovely long roots off. She said if I bent the roots over to bury them in the substrate that it hurts the roots and the plant, and that's not good. That was probably one of the Noob mistakes I made last time. The other was trying to bury the sponge surrounding the roots in the substrate, because...I don't know why, I just did. It didn't work, because it's a sponge and it wanted to float, even when covered by rocks.

This time around I carefully cut the plants out of their little plastic pots and carefully pulled apart and removed the foam sponge surrounding the roots, then I carefully separated the plants because while it wasn't obvious at first glance each pot actually came with more than just one plant.

There were two Chain Swords in their pot, but I'm sad to report that their roots were very brown and I didn't like the look of them (the roots, not the plant itself). I still planted them because (as you'll see from the picture below) their foliage was green and looked quite healthy, so I'll just hope for the best with those two.

From the Red Wendth pot I got over six individual plants (this was the one with the beautiful, long roots) and the boy and I carefully trimmed their beautiful, long roots back to about half an inch before planting them in the tank, too.

Oddly enough, as Pike has noted on her Blog about her fish seeming happier after a water change, my Tetras likewise seemed excited (or at least more active) with the new addition to their tank, as they now have a small underwater forest (of sorts) in which to hide and swim through. Then again, I also did a 25% water change (I have a 2.5 gallon bucket so I siphon out a bucketful of water from my 10-gallon tank then add a bucket of water), partly because it had been over a week since I'd done a water change, partly because I needed to take some water out so when I stuck my arm in the tank it didn't overflow, and partly because I deliberately stirred up the substrate so there was a lot of fish crap floating around. It was so murky that even though I changed the filter prior to the water change, it was covered with junk within minutes and water was backflowing out of the filter. After topping the tank back up to 10-gallons I rinsed even more crud off the filter (yes, again), then later in the evening rinsed it off one more time.

I checked on the fish this morning at breakfast and we still had a tank full of fish, still alive and still seeming to enjoy their new underwater forest home. If they were going to die from something brought in on the new plants, with it being such a small confined space I'd expect the first deaths to occur within hours. But they were alive this morning and they're happy as clams now, 24 hours later, so obviously they've survived the addition of the plants. Now I just need the plants to survive being transplanted into their new home.

Finally, here's a picture...

Click to make FHuge!