New to Plants

[spottedcatfish]

Hey all,

Ok, here's what I'm going to be running, I want to take a stab at this plant thing one more time. My last try was horribly unsuccessful, but hopefully I can get them to stay alive this time.

I will have a ten gallon with:
1 Betta
6 smallish tetras (I think Glo-lights)
3-4 smallish cories (pandas or possibly 6 dwarves)

The hood I have supports a couple of 25 watt bulbs.

My substrate is smooth pea size gravel, about 1/2" to 1" deep, but this could be increased.

Are they any plants I could get going in this setup? I've got plastic ones now, but I'm hoping to replace all or most of them, mostly for the sake of the betta, there's one in particular that my last betta got caught on, so I want to replace it first.

[AntmanMike]

Too many fish.
What kind of filtration do you have? Your lighting description is too ambiguous.

For plants, you will probably want at least 2" of gravel. Laterite or soaked Vermiculite (or florite) might be helpful. 2-3watts per gallon is a rule. Try 2.5 watts per gallon (25 watts.).

[spottedcatfish]

No fish in there at the moment, that's the tenative plan for the tank. Filter is a Whisper 10 (or something along those lines, its from a tank I had a while back and there's no name on it, so I'm coming from a 6 month old memory here) stuffed with 3 Aquaclear 3 sponges (last time this was sufficient to keep the flow low enough for a happy betta).

I've currently got 2 25 Watt incandesent bulbs in the hood, just because that was what it would take and they were on sale at the local K-Mart, I hadn't given thought to plants at the time, so I just figured they would be nice for looking at the fish. Would I need a specific sort of bulb with less wattage?

I figured I would need more gravel, is the kind I have a total bust? Or can I just add some more of it into the tank to increase the depth to 2"? I'm not sure I have the money to invest in a totally new substrate, but do you have some good articles on laterite (or the others) and a place to find them online? I've heard of them, but haven't seem them for sale around here (I may just not have looked closely enough).

[tfish]

I used to have a planted 10 gallon that was low-tech to the extreme. I had the same pea gravel that you have -- got it from Petsmart. I had 2" though. Had a similar filter and only used the flourescent light hood that came with the tank. (The hood consisted of just one 15watt tube.) I didn't do any CO2, nor did I add nutrients or any kind of fertilizer. I didn't even know about that stuff way back then! (Even if I did, I didn't have the time to do all that stuff between going to college and working numerous jobs. I barely even fit in the time to do my weekly water changes. And that's pretty sad considering it was only a 2 gallon change.) Anyhow, all I did was plop some java fern and 3 cryptocoryne wendtiis in and they did AWESOME! When I got the 3 crypts, they were pretty small. After ~6 months, they were huge and spreading out across my tank! My java fern grew a little more slowly but was very happy.

Anyhow, that was my success story. Did very little for these low light tolerant plants, but they seemed to be just fine. So I guess my tip would be that if you want to do something pretty simple, just be sure to find hardy plants that can tolerate the lower light levels. Java fern and crypts did the trick for me.

Also, the only bouts of algea that I ever experienced in the 2 years that this tank was up and running was some green water, and that was just due to too many fish, so be careful of that.

Well, that was just my experience. I'm sure others will have much more to offer. If you want to grow other plants, there are a number of different options you can look at. Adding CO2 is one, and that is pretty easy. Ferts and additional lighting is always a plus too, but if you don't want to get into that, you CAN grow successfully with what you have. I did, and if I can, ANYONE can!

Good luck!

[bmarcus]

http://home.earthlink.net/~barney316/images/Picture%20001.jpg
thats my 10, substrate is 1 bag of seachem red flourite (http://www.seachem.com/seachemframeset.html) , with 2 15 watt all-glass florescent strips sitting opposite ways across the top for better coverage, and a penguin 270 for filtration. I have seachem flourish tabs (http://www.seachem.com/seachemframeset.html) in the substrate and add seachem excel (http://www.seachem.com/seachemframeset.html) daily in place of co2 injection with Flourish complete (http://www.seachem.com/seachemframeset.html) twice a week. all this stuff lasts forever on a 10 so its a 1 time investment for the most part.

[bmarcus]

by the way the substrate isnt purple, my camera sucks at stills, its a digital video camera

[bmarcus]

oh, and one last thing, the fish are a mated pair of rams and thats it

[kveeti]

tfish has good ideas if you don't want to go to any trouble (I know I didn't). Don't even bother worrying about your substrate and get low light plants that you can attach to rough stones or driftwood, such as java fern, java moss, anubias, bolbitis. Crypt is good, too, you could just pile up some gravel in a corner for one.

Your only problem is the incandesent bulbs... but you can get screw-in fluorescents to replace them. There have been a couple threads on that if you did a search. I have had a hard time finding screw-ins in the right K range up here but they seem to be more available in the U.S.

[djlen]

Actually Spotted, 25 watts is a lot of light for a 10 gallon aquarium. You can grow just about anything with those numbers. But as was previously mentioned, it should be fluorescent light. Plants like it much better than incandescent.
From what I read, you have nothing in the tank at this point, correct? Is the tank cycled? In case you don't know what that means, "cycling" is a process that all newly set up aquariums must go through in order for it's future inhabitants to be able to live comfortably. So that's one question we'll need an answer to.
You will need about 2" of gravel(roughly 10-15ls). The types mentioned above are optimum, especially the Fluorite(by Seachem), but will cost a little more money. You can get by with a fine gravel. Not as fine as sand, but it should be finer than pea size.
These people will teach you how to be successful, and that it's not all that difficult to achieve whatever you want in a planted tank.
Tell us whether your tank is cycled, and if it is, for how long. Also, do you have any test kits; pH, nitrites,nitrates,ammonia? Once we know the answers to those questions we can go from there.
Len