mini lawn

i want to create "lawn" in the foreground. basically i want a ground cover plant that will take over and cover my entire substrate but also stays rather short around 1inch. i have 40lbs tahitian moon black sand mixed with20lbs FloraMax(which kinda irritates me cuz it has orange mixed with the black; oh well you get what pay for). regardless. im going to build my own canister filter and use my 2 aquaclear 50s for my other tanks. and more than likely im eventually going to build myself a diy CO2 diffuser

What size tank and what is the depth of the tank. Classic foreground lawn plant is chain swords...they do need a decent amount of light but propigate readily and quickly spread thruout the tank. Baby tears is another good lawn also requires good amount of light mine seems to get uprooted fairley easy bu my cories as opposed to the chain swords. I have seen java fern/chrismas fern grow easily along the bottom of a tank but does not look lawn like. Some of your crypts do well; pavra (check spelling) stays small and buds off incredible fast does not require alot of light. And finally I have had good luck buying Java fern mats (usually 12"x12" or so) and creating a red neck trailer park lawn....even found some minurature budwiser bottles that might end up in the tank with a few 6 plastic cars with no wheels.

good luck and let us know how it goes

I have been wondering about setting up a planted tank, mainly because I miss plants in a tank, and keep cichlids...say no more.
I have a few Swordtail? plants in a Hap tank, which are struggling.

Now for my question (dam I seem to have so many questions). Has anyone tried to put the plant substrate in something like a "planting sock"?

You know the sort of thing gardeners use to prevent weeds, the black water permiable membrane that cuts out light, but lets rain water soak through. Well I was wondering if anyone had found something that has worked for them in a tank. AND what did it do to your pH? (I would hate to mess up the pH in my Haps tank).
As for what to use, I had ideas that ranged from old tights.. I think you call them pantyhose through to buying some of the gardening matting as a large under gravel/sand matting. If so I would soak it for days, and test the hell out of it, but I would expect it to be a polypropylene or polyethylyne base poduct which should be safe.

You can probably buy a large filter media bag and wrap it around a pot. The problem I see with that is that most aquztic plants need to have exposed root crowns or rhyzomes, I do not know if it would work with the plants.

I would stay away from the weed bed stuff at the gardening stores...most of the m are biodegradable and would just disolve inside of a fish tank.

dwarf hair grass is great. but if you don,t have strong lignting or a small tank then it wont grow great.
e. tellununs( dwarf chain sword) is a great lawn effect plant and very easy to grow, or dwarf sag.

yes dwarf sag. grows fast my friend can get his to grow up to 20 inches in his tank, and it carpet fast.. it also depends on your lighting. the lawn look i would say dwarf hair grass, dwarf sag, crypt parva, or micro sword, or narrow leaf micro sword. or pknmy chain sword.

foreground ive decided on babys tears cuz its the shortest. mid ground ill use chain sword. now can anyone sell me some cheap?

With the right lighting and CO2, DHG can be made to look awesome. You will trim it just as if mowing a yard. You can even cut at varying heights for a better effect.

Not to discourage you...but good luck with the HC. It can (will) be a bear to plant. ;o)

ive got a idea to use netting staked down to keep the Dwrf baby tears down. but how log should it take to take root?

it will take a while for baby tears and dwarf baby tears to grow it needs lots of living and c02... i would dry start it... it in the substrate with just enough water to cover the baby tears, and substrate. put a plastic wrap around the top, and seal it tighly then put your lighting on and it will get it to grow to grow it's roots in to the substrate faster. then once it has grow in and carpet flood the tank with water to the top..

lots of people do it this way so the plant does float to the top...

aquariumplants.com sells it in a 3x5 something like that mat for 5-10 dollars which is a good price.

http://www.aquariumplants.com/Baby_Tears_Dwarf_grown_on_plantable_MAT_3_x6_p/btm1.htm

or dwarf hair grass.

http://www.aquariumplants.com/Dwarf_Hairgrass_Eleocharis_acicularis_p/dhm1.htm

or you just by this one and put it in to smaller pieces and save a lot of time one dang good deal. 10x10 mat of dwarf baby tears for 45.00 plus shipping, just a small pot of baby tears at LFS where i am is 6.99 and it's a 1x1 in size..

http://www.aquariumplants.com/Baby_Tears_Dwarf_on_MAT_10x10_p/dwm10.htm

Something to think about. I have several tanks with patches of hairgrass or dwarf sword. The problem is cleaning. You can not do a deep substrate cleaning without pulling up the plants. I know they say the plants will use the wasted food and poo. That depends on what you have in the tank, small fish like enders or guppies may be fine (they do multiply like crazy) Large fish poo a LOT. Then you have fry which like to hide in the grass. Believe it or not snails poo a lot and they like to be in the grass. Uneaten food seam to find the grass. At one time I wanted a complete cover of grass, not now.

tomany wrote:

The problem is cleaning. You can not do a deep substrate cleaning without pulling up the plants

How I get around this is using a bamboo skewer and swirling it in and amoungst the DHG before doing the water change. It stirs things up without disturbing anything. I can then use a piece of tubing for the water change. Works excellent I must say. ;o)

You are still only getting the surface.

tomany wrote:

You are still only getting the surface.

You don't need to get under the substrate for these plants. The skewer will allow you to get right to the top of the surface within the lawn.

I can vacuum the surface. But having a whole tank planted in (grass), to me would end up a filthy, toxic mess. Maybe not so bad if you have a LOT of MTSs.

well i failed with the mirco sword, and baby's tears. i suppose i shouldve known better. the cichlids were unrelenting in uprooting and nipping at them. a few stray pieces float aroung in between the dense floating mat of hornwort, but not enough to work with in its current state. i think im going to try Riccia now and also in a plant only tank.

my folks wont be too pleased i can imagine with the prospect of another tank in the house. so we shall see if i can grow it outside.

Ricca is a floating plant. You can use fishing line to wrap the ricca to something. It will attach to your object. All sag. are now illegal in Texas.

yes riccia fluccians (crystal wort) is a floating plant. it can be wrapped around rocks with netting, and it will grow out of the netting to use as a fore ground.

and when id all Sagittaria. become illegal in texas?

I recieved the list 10/11/11. Also on list some anubius.

Dr. Who wrote:

I recieved the list 10/11/11. Also on list some anubius.

hum weird, as far i know thing are back to normal now, and went back to the old laws.

They are on a new restricted list. Means they can no long be ship into the state. Anubius gigantic and conglius are also restricted. If you PM your email address I will forward you the list.

I've just recently planted some lawns of Marcelia in 5 different tanks (got a huge chunk of it in the large collection I won on aquabid) Seems to be doing well - most of it even staying buried in my JD/Bichir tank. I have found that in the shrimp breeding tanks, I have to plant back pieces that the larger amano shrimp root up about every couple of days. I try to plant them so that just the tips of their leaves are visible - seems to keep them from being rooted up before they get rooted down The nice thing is that it doesn't bother it to be rooted up and floating at the surface since it can be both a submergent or emergent.

I am trying a new experiment since I envision an attempt to make an aquascape of some famous golf course one of these days.... I'm trying to grow a lawn of Marimino moss. I've already grown it by coating a thin layer over rocks with netting over it all - and it takes on different shapes like manicured boxwoods. So this time I've spread a layer over a ceramic tile and covered with pantyhose. Did that 10 days ago and I can already see Marimino growing up through the pantyhose. Should look GREAT in 30 days or so! Very bright green and looks just like golf course grass.

Here's a good list of several different types of foreground plants used by aquascapers. http://www.aquaticplantcentral.com/forumapc/plantfinder/go.php

hmmm. ill tyr the Marimo out, its just scattered around randomly. i never thought of cultivating that.

Here's a question:

How do you get microwords to grow thick in an area - instead of rambling threads all around the tank?