Rooting Hormones

[Wroberson]

I was wondering if anyone here has ever used a rooting hormone in their tanks. I know what it is and use it when cloning my house plants, but I haven'e used it in the aqaurium.

First here's how you use it to clone plants. Take a cutting from your houseplant, or green wood from a tree. Trim the cutting and remove leaves from 2-3 nodes from the bottom of the stem. Dip the cutting in some water. Dip the wet cutting into the rooting hormone. Place cutting in soil. The rooting hormone causes the plant to focus on producing and growing roots. In about a month, the cutting will be ready to transplant into is' new home.

In the Aquarium, here's how I might work it.

Make a waterbase solution using the rooting hormone. Take cuttings from your plants, even a single leaf of an anubias. Remove leaves from 2-3 node as the nodes is where the roots will grow from. For a single leaf, cut the end clean at a 45 degree angle to give surface area for roots to form. Soak cutting in the solution for 4-5 hours, maybe a day. Rinse and plant in aquarium.

Another thought is to dip the cutting into the rooting powder and wrap with paper towel, maybe thin plastic wrap. Plant in aquarium. This idea come from a cloning process where you clone a brand from a woody plant. This process requires a root stock and you fuse the cutting to the root stock and secure it tightly with plastic wrap and rubber bands. In the end you get an apple tree with the root stock of a maple.

Just wondering if anyone has every tried rooting hormones with aquarium plants, and also looking for ideas and original opinions on whether or not it might work safely with fish.

[Mumma.of.two]

I can not say if it is safe or not but many aquarium plants are super easy to propagate. For example anubias. All you have I do is cut the rhizome in half leaving some leaves in both sides. This also works for java fern as well as letting daughter plants shoot from old leaves. Stem plants shoot roots like crazy wherever they are planted and plants like swords will shoot runners with daughter plants.

[Wroberson]

I've always had difficulty with rooting bunched plants. It's hard to find them with a great set of roots. So, I was thinking rooting hormone might work to get the bunched plants to root, or root faster. That's why I none. I can never get them to root.

[jetajockey]

I don't see how it'd hurt, I do know that one diy root hormone method is to make willow tea. And people use willow branches in aquaria all the time so why not.

What kind of substrate are you using?

[Kellie]

I seem to think rooting powder is similiar in composition to aspirin. I'd be worried about any of the additives though, maybe if you found an "all natural" one that was just pure willow with no preservatives. For my own curiousity I googled aspirin in the fish tank, some people say its a good bath for a sick fish, others say it could cause renal failure. I know even one pain reliever can be deadly to a small dog and (most) fish weigh less then that so I'd be scared to try it.