tank up

[attiladahun]

hey,
if anyone remembered a few months ago when i said i would get my 20-gal tank set up with plants and new fish.

I got the plants set up last thursday, but all is not right. I bought 1 potted basket arrangement thingy each of what i'm pretty sure is amazon sword, wisteria, and what may be vallis or (i hope not) mondo grass. the grassy stuff is yellowing and the sword is getting little brown spots on its leaves. the wisteria is getting along just fine.

also, are you supposed to take the plants out of the little plastic basket pot and plant them loosely or just put them in the tank with the pot buried under the gravel?

 

[rrkss]

Mondo grass looks like hedge grass in your lawn and can support itself out of the water. Vallisneria is much broader and tends to clump and flop when taken out of the water. Did you add fish to the tank yet? I hope not because my first experience with ich came from plants that I bought at petsmart. The sad thing is that these plants came from a plant only tank so I assume that the shipment just came in. Good luck. Most of the plants should recover after the initial shock of new conditions.

 

[attiladahun]

yeah, i've had fish in the tank for a few months, and since the place where i got the plants was a plants only tank, i never thought that there would be a problem with disease. Also, i'm now pretty sure that the plant is mondo grass- can mondo grass live in an aquarium?

another thing, one of the reasons that i decided on a planted tank was to control algae, but a petco guy said that "the algae grows off the plants" and that algae would get worse because of a planted tank.

 

[Diego L.]

Well my handy aquarium book says...plants reduce the amounts of algae because since they are a more evolved than algae they absorb the nutrients the algae wouldve absorbed...most petco guys dont know what they are talking about...they told my brother that a betta was fine with tap water...the betta died...

 

[Watcher74]

A betta is fine with tap water. I've had a betta for over a year in nothing but tap water. There was some other reason why the betta died.

 

[imhandy2]

Yes, take the plants out of the basket then out of the rockwool.
Rinse it thouroughly for unwanted snails. I personally strip it down by removing all decayed plant or root material off then do a 25:1 bleach dip.
I don't want to introduce any form of algae into my tank and dipping it in bleach for an certain amount of time will kill it off. A little tip for planting, I use an 8" pair of tweezers and gather the roots together and then grab ahold of the longest part of the roots with the tweezers and push them dowm into the substrate. You can do this with the most delicate of plants with almost no disruption to the substrate.
Hope this helps.

Terry.

 

[rrkss]

Mondo Grass will live in your tank for a short period of time and then rot and pollute your water. The Petco guys don't know what they are talking about. My goldfish tank is my only tank which I have to scrub clean from algae probably because of the lack of live plants in it. Even though you bought the plants from a plant only tank, watch your tank for the next couple weeks very closely for any disease symptoms since you have no idea if any diseases got introduced into the plant only tank from a recent shipment.

 

[IceH2O]

my first experience with ich came from plants that I bought at petsmart. The sad thing is that these plants came from a plant only tank so I assume that the shipment just came in.

If you look closely,and it might not be all Petsmarts but mine does it,there are fish in the tanks.Usually just a few,why I don't know and never asked.But the way my Petsmart has it set up is 3 different tanks stack stadium style with the water from the top tank flowing into the 2nd tank and then the 2rd tank,a pump bringing it back to the 1st tank.I always see some tetras,or goldfish,or some other smaller type fish.

Be terrible if they use them for QT tanks! Most likely they are fish that were getting picked on unmerciously,or were runts(can fish have runts?) and moved for their protection.