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Originally Posted by Simpte
My feelings are if you want a planted tank, spend the few wxtra dollars to make it easy on yourself. Many people wake up and decide "hey I want to add plants to my tank" and get discouraged when the plants fail.
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I certainly agree that if you want plants to succeed you're best off designing the tank for plants from the start, with a good substrate, and then add a decent amount of light (in almost all cases, a sinlge strip-light ain't gonna do it). But the point I'm trying to make is that growing plants doesn't have to be expensive. Well, you have to pay a fair bit for the lighting, no getting away from it, but your substrate can be dirt cheap (literally) and you don't have to have CO2.
Yes, you have to have CO2 and LOTS of light to grow things like Cabomba, and red plants, and riccia, but if you just want a tank full of nice green plants, it can be done fairly inexpensively. There's no need to be put off from growing plants by not having the money for an Eco-complete substrate and very high lighting, and you don't need to pay hundreds of dollars for a CO2 system (or mess with the 2-liter soda bottle trick).
Anyway, I'll leave it at that. I think that David Doyle has summarized the various approaches better than either Simpte or I have, as I have such a low-tech bias and Simpte has such a high-tech bias. David has made it clear that as you increase the "tech" (add more light, add more CO2, add more ferts) you'll be able to grow more and more plants, and you need to choose which plants you want to grow in order to decide which route to take. Also I agree with his suggestion to start on the lower tech end and then add more if/when you want it. I think that's the message to take home from this thread.
As for my little 5 gallon work tank... The plants are:
on the left, micro sag, anubias nana, twisted vallis
in the middle, one rock and some echinodorus quadrisomething
on the right, two types of small crypts and some marsilea crenata in front
I must admit that I'm surprised and pleased that you like it! It's about as far from those show tanks as a rowboat is from an ocean liner... It's much more of "natural mess" than "thing of beauty". As for the thread algae, I do quite a bit of waterchanging (~30% per week, all in one go), and I end up overfeeding because of the fry. I really am trying to get a handle on just how much to feed to keep it all in balance, but it's taking time. Also, I don't want to get rid of all the algae, as I've noticed that the bigger babies tend to pick at it. Perhaps they're eating little critters they see in it rather than the algae itself, but for whatever reason, I don't want it all gone.