Mr Burns
Aquarium Advice FINatic
hey all! first post here...
i have all silk plants in my aquarium right now. i prefer them over plastic and real b/c they look great and they're easy as hell to clean and rearrange. i don't know if anybody else here does it, but i take all of my plants out, get a 5gal bucket, hot hot water and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. i mix them all together and let them sit overnight. in the morning i give them a thorough rinsing and they look brand new. but i digress...
when i build and stock my new 60gal (55x16x16), i was hoping to create somewhat of a "grassy hillside." roughly one foot of the right side of the tank would be raised by at least 4" if possible. i would like short (max height between 1-2"), lush plant to cover this raised area, down the slope, then be trimmed and maintained to fade out to a more open area. i was thinking about doing this simply by piling up the substrate, but i wasn't sure how that would affect the UGF and debris collection...
unfortunately, after searching without satisfactory results to find a silk plant that will act as a carpet cover , i was wondering if there are some hardy (low maintenance, resilient) live plants that i might be able to try. my cousin's husband ownes an aquarium pet shop, so i can get pretty much anything i want flown in if need be. the problem is that i've never found a carpet growth fake plant that is visually or functionally satisfactory for me. it would just look way too......fake. i don't really have a problem with keeping a live plant under control as long as that means just cutting or pulling it back when it starts taking up too much floorspace. as an added bonus, i was hoping that a carpet plant like this would be able to somehow support algae growth for the pleco.
i think i've narrowed my choices of live plants down to:
•dwarf clove (marsilea quadrifolia)
•glossostigma elatinoides
•ricca grass
i'm leaning towards the marsilea, but there are a ton of varieties in the marsilea that it's hard to pick which one would work best. i've heard that the glossostigma and ricca are probably going to require a lot of extra work and the inclusion of a c02 pump, which i would rather not do...
is there any other ground cover plants that i missed? what would you suggest for this situation? how hard would it be to get that plant to grow? how fast does it grow? what kind of maintenance/requirement would be required? should i be worried about trying to clean the gravel underneath it?
thanks!
i have all silk plants in my aquarium right now. i prefer them over plastic and real b/c they look great and they're easy as hell to clean and rearrange. i don't know if anybody else here does it, but i take all of my plants out, get a 5gal bucket, hot hot water and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. i mix them all together and let them sit overnight. in the morning i give them a thorough rinsing and they look brand new. but i digress...
when i build and stock my new 60gal (55x16x16), i was hoping to create somewhat of a "grassy hillside." roughly one foot of the right side of the tank would be raised by at least 4" if possible. i would like short (max height between 1-2"), lush plant to cover this raised area, down the slope, then be trimmed and maintained to fade out to a more open area. i was thinking about doing this simply by piling up the substrate, but i wasn't sure how that would affect the UGF and debris collection...
unfortunately, after searching without satisfactory results to find a silk plant that will act as a carpet cover , i was wondering if there are some hardy (low maintenance, resilient) live plants that i might be able to try. my cousin's husband ownes an aquarium pet shop, so i can get pretty much anything i want flown in if need be. the problem is that i've never found a carpet growth fake plant that is visually or functionally satisfactory for me. it would just look way too......fake. i don't really have a problem with keeping a live plant under control as long as that means just cutting or pulling it back when it starts taking up too much floorspace. as an added bonus, i was hoping that a carpet plant like this would be able to somehow support algae growth for the pleco.
i think i've narrowed my choices of live plants down to:
•dwarf clove (marsilea quadrifolia)
•glossostigma elatinoides
•ricca grass
i'm leaning towards the marsilea, but there are a ton of varieties in the marsilea that it's hard to pick which one would work best. i've heard that the glossostigma and ricca are probably going to require a lot of extra work and the inclusion of a c02 pump, which i would rather not do...
is there any other ground cover plants that i missed? what would you suggest for this situation? how hard would it be to get that plant to grow? how fast does it grow? what kind of maintenance/requirement would be required? should i be worried about trying to clean the gravel underneath it?
thanks!