gravel suitable substrate?

[tobitz]

hey whats going on folks, im new to the whole planted tank thing so please be

patient with me. I have 29gal tank with gravel for substrate, would this be good

enough for a planted tank? or would i have to change it? ive seen people use

something called soilmaster select... is that recommended?

[MyraVan]

Gravel works for some easy plants (eg dwarf sag will grow in anything) but in general a substrate better suited for planted tanks will result in better growth, or the ability to grow a better variety of plants. Any of the commercial planted tank substrates will work, but they're expensive. I use 1" of soil covered by 1" of plain gravel which is cheap and works well for growing plants, but has some definite drawbacks: if you uproot established plants you get a tank full of mud that takes a few hours (up to a day) to clear, and if you get the wrong types of soil it can release large amounts of ammonia, or stain your water yellow, or both.

How much lighting do you have (how many watts of your lighting tubes)? That is the other major determining factor as for how succesful you'll be at growing plants.

[Zoe]

If you're big into plants, I suggest that you go for the gusto.
While you can grow a variety of plants in regular gravel, you will find you'll have much more success if you use a plant substrate; my personal favourite is Fluorite, but any commercial brand will do. You can also mix them with regular gravel, or use the plant substrate alone.
A word of advice: these commercial plant substrates will make your tank look like mud for days if you rinse it first. So, unless the package tells you that you must rinse it before putting it in your tank, I suggest you put it in your tank dry, and it will be MUCH less cloudy that way. If you want to / must rinse the gravel first, let it dry completely before putting in the tank (If you google: Rinsing Fluorite, you'll come across a good article about this process).

Anyhoo, that said, if you only want to go with some basic plants, then you don't need to get the expensive substrate, because regular gravel will be fine. You can add some Seachem root tabs to boost root fertilization.

You might also want to look into DIY CO2.

[tobitz]

well i already have a nutrafin co2 kit thats running just fine, as for lighting i will have about 60 watts. and where would i get some flourite? ive check the pets mart but i cant seem to find any

[Zoe]

You'll probably have to try to find a more specialized fish store in your area.

[MyraVan]

You've got enough lighting for what I would consider a moderate-light planted tank (and this is the amount of light I use in most of my setups), although many enthusiasts use much more than this. Since you've got CO2, you'll really be letting yourself down if you stick with plain gravel. You should definitely go for a specialist planted substrate. Over here you can get the stuff mail order, but it's expensive because the shipping costs are so high. So try online to see what pops up.

If you find that it's too expensive to have something like Flourite shipped, you could try a more old-fashioned form of planted tank substrate: laterite and gravel, see
http://www.aquabotanic.com/latr.htm
for more info on this. The advantage of the laterite thing is that you can mix it with ordinary gravel, thus you only have to pay shipping on the laterite itself, which might make it more feasible to mail order.

Since laterite is a kind of soil-like stuff, it bears some resemblance to the soil + gravel substrate that I use. Like my substrate, I would guess that if you uproot established plants, you'll get cloudy water for a few hours, but you certainly won't have any problems with ammonia or yellow water.