Show me fake can look as good as real plants!

It's all a matter of preference. I prefer natural looking tanks but admit I do have one with a sunken airplane in it.

I "dont see the point" of fake plants, except as cover for fry. Low-light live plants are easy to grow and maintain, plus they make more.

I have never used CO2 in any of my tanks and they look great ( at least to me they do!)

Here are several pics of my tanks with low-light plants and no CO2

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nice! I'd try this!


Why not go low light, slow grow with no CO2 in the 55 ? I did this with my 46BF, and it doesn't look bad. I use liquid ferts 1x per week, and I may have to trim the Amazon sword back every 4 or 5 months. Very low maintenance - which fits me perfectly ! Good luck.

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my 55 with fake plants and fake tree stumps, at one point in 2009:

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same plants and fake stumps in my avatar too, a couple years later.

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Thanks for the stuff so far, guys. Keep all the great pictures coming! They're giving me great inspiration :)
 
Hey bro, I'd say try low tech planted its really easy and allot of fun. Here are my tanks...all live plants, all low tech. Only thing I did that really promotes grows is mineralized top soil which actually made the substrate fairly cheep. I think about $50 for my 50 breeder. The 10gs are both walstads and the 20L on the bottom has Seachem cichlid sand in it. The final shot is of my wife's tank which is about 3wpg has plain old silica based sand in it and got a whole bunch of root tabs under each plant...I say go low tech live plants simply because of the ecological filtration...and frankly...they're fun to watch grow.



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I'm a gardener, but when it comes to aquarium plants, I have a black thumb... So here's my tank with cheapo mass produced plastic plants.

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Certainly not as gorgeous as a live planted tank. But a far cry from multicolored gravel and random plastic plants.

Lisa

PS - there are a couple live plants clinging to life in those pictures...

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Here's an old pic of a past tank of mine. All plastic plants.

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Having started w a tank full of fake plants and now beginning my foray into keeping living plants I've made 2 observations
1. Plastic plants can look nice but don't get anywhere near looking like the real thing
2. It may just be my impression but it seems that my fish "interact" more with the real plants than they did w the plastic ones, such as swimming through them.
 
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The 135 I used to have.
Bought all the plastic plants and real driftwood off ebAY.
It didn't cost an arm and leg either.
Try to make the presentation as natural as possible to become more convincing.

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