I thought this was supposed to be hard!

[WaterPond]

I bought a bunch of Rotala wallichii about a week ago, and i never expected it to do well. I bought it withought knowing that it is supposed to be an extremely difficult plant to care for. It is doing rather well though. It is getting some nice red growth on the top. It was even pearling the other day. I love this plant. It really draws your eye to it. When i bought it it was not rooted, now it has developed quite the root system.

It has even developed little chutes of new growth coming off of it. This is frickin awsome.

Anybody got any good tips to keep this plant growing the way it is?

 

[dapellegrini]

My only advice is to avoid SAEs... They will destroy that plant...

 

[WaterPond]

LOL, well it is only a 5gal, so i am thinking i will definately not have a SAE

 

[SparKy697]

Ignorance is bliss!

I sometimes do the best when I don't know that I can't do it that way.

Nice plant!

 

[frostby]

I hate you!!! Can you send me about 55gallons of your water!

 

[Zezmo]

No plants are hard.... they either do well under the conditions you provide or they die. The trick is cycling through all the plants that are available and learning which ones thrive under the conditions you are already giving them.

There are people who kill java ferns every time, and yet somehow thier Eriocaulons grow like weeds. heh.... that is a nice plant BTW

 

[newfound77951]

Nice! R wallichi won't grow for me at all, I'm having some success with Rotala "vietnam" which looks similar but without the nice red.

I really like that overhead shot, by the way!

 

[J Migidy]

My only advice is to avoid SAEs... They will destroy that plant...

I thought that SAEs don't really eat plants and are good algae consumers to have in a planted tank?

 

[dapellegrini]

They WILL eat fine, needle-leaf plants like R. Wallichii and Mayaca. They destroyed mine. They won't harm most anything else (algae aside of course)...

 

[Zezmo]

Yep...SAE's eat a variety of fine leafed plants...they also love to eat moss.

 

[zenkatydid]

imo a week is not long enough to tell whetyher a plant is going to do well. i have had many a plant do brilliantly - roots, shoots, the lot - for 2 or 3 weeks, even longer, then suddenly die.

 

[GlitcH]

Looks better than mine Waterpond.........I've had mine for a couple weeks and it's alive but I don't see any new growth at all.
I have it in three different tanks and I'm getting the same drab results from each.

It looks like when that grows out it's gonna have a great color to it.

 

[blazeyreef]

No plants are hard.... they either do well under the conditions you provide or they die. The trick is cycling through all the plants that are available and learning which ones thrive under the conditions you are already giving them.

There are people who kill java ferns every time, and yet somehow thier Eriocaulons grow like weeds. heh.... that is a nice plant BTW

that is so me, I cant grow java moss for the life of me but yet I can grow some extremely "hard" plants! congrats on the wallichii, mine did good untill I had an aglea atack