Growing Plants from Bulbs

garth7

Hello all,

I am still in the process of cycling and read a good article about cycling with out fish and only plants. Click the link to go to the article. Chuck's Planted Aquarium Pages

While in wally world yesterday waiting on my wife, I stumbled over to the pets section. Besides seeing a lot of fish with ich, I found some plant bulbs. They were only a buck so I picked up a package of two bulbs. The package contained Nymphaea Lilly Bulbs (red or green). The package said these were garanteed to grow 3" to 5" inches in 20 days. Any thougts on these at all? I am going to the lfs today to pick up a bunch of other plants.

1. Give me your thoughts on the bulbs (yes, no, any problems with them?)

2. Any other plants worth while looking at? Keep in mind I am a beginner.

Also, I know I have not included lighting or tank parameters in my post, but I am on lunch and a limited time schedule. Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Doug

Jay

The bulbs are fun Sometimes they grow sometimes not. If you are set up to keep a planted aquarium they will last a good while.

You might want to check out the sticky article on cycling your tank in the freshwater forum. Chuck is an acknowledged pioneer in the planted tank field, but I want to point out several things...he has not updated his pages in several years leaving his dosing calculations, methods, and chemicals a little out of date.

Second..the fishless cycle he is proposing is an advanced technique requiring the mastery of estimating needed plant mass, CO2 injection, NPK dosing, algae control, and water chemistry.
I think it is a train wreck waiting to happen for a beginner to jump into that.

There are about 300 submerged aquatic plants available to the planted tank hobbyist. Recommendations really are going to be conditioned on your tank paramaters, substrate, light, anticipated starting plant mass, etc. I would poke around in the planted tank sub forum for some beginning information.

Please do not consider this a nay say, its really a heads up..look before you jump in

Please get back with questions.

Regards,
Jay

RedBaron

Welcome to the forum

Glad to see that you are interested in plants, I am not as devote as Jay, however, I have found that real plants add a certain calming effect to the fish.

Reading through the post, you have done a lot of research, good for you! Take a look at the package and see what the light requirements are for the plants that you picked up, that should give you an idea of what type of lighting you will need.

Depending on how many plants, size of tank, end stocking, etc., will depend on what information we can provide. I have a 20H with a Coralife CF 65W 6700?, which works out to about 3.25 WPG. Most of my plants are doing well, as far as an amature can say. One thing that will be a big help in having plants, is a light timer, that way you can control when and how much light your tank is receiving.

Thanks for posting and look forward to seeing more from you.

Jay

A coralife fixture with 3.5 WPG is perfect for almost all plants you would want to grow, and a timer is perfect for algae control.

and the hobbyist!

Jay