My new plant order arrived from TGM yesterday, so I had a planting session last night and also worked on some of the existing plants to tidy them up. I drained 50% of the water, then planted up the new Limnophila H. If I had realised how many stems you got in one Tropica pot I may have only ordered one pot, but I had two, so I planted densely and will let it fight it out. I'm really hoping the more established plant does better in my tank. I moved the DC down next to it and I have lime green bordering on yellow and I can see gentle flow behind the wood, so hoping that it has what it need to survive.
My Ranunculous had a few manky looking bits lower down, but its tricky to deal with in tank as it is so low and all connected by runners. I therefore uprooted all the bad bits, took some good with it, trimmed off the bad and replanted the good. I also took the few bits of Ranunculous from the left of the tank and replanted with the bits over on the right. I think it looks better all together and the space cleared on the left will be filled in with S. Repens in time.
My next task was the S. Repens; I had a Tropica tissue culture pot in my order to start filling in gaps faster. There were so many stems in the pot, but all really tiny, way smaller than the ones I got from CO2 Art recently. It took a long time to get stems ready for planting, but with some patience I planted about 20 very small stems in the area where the Ranunculous had come out and then started filling in gaps between the older stems. Some of the older stems have put on some height, so I topped a few of those and replanted the tops in the gaps.
I decided that I needed to do something about the Alternanthera Reinecki Mini. Most of the plants that went in at the start that switched from emmersed to submersed growth ended up loosing the original leaves and replacing them with new ones. This was not the case with the Alternanthera, each stem had new leaves but also had bad looking lower leaves at substrate level, they were still alive, but not in good condition. My Alternanthera is growing very slowly, I guessed that it may well be trying to put a lot of energy in to maintaining all these old leaves and fighting a loosing battle. I had planted over a wider area than I intended originally, so I uprooted all the Alternanthera, painstakingly removed each bad leaf, then replanted all the plantlets with just the new growth. I retained the roots of each one and planted a little deeper leaving some of the stem and the new good looking leaves above the substrate. Hopefully this was not a mistake, it looks much nicer now. I'm hoping it focuses on new growth now and thrives in time!
My Echinodorus Reni is gradually adding new leaves, but they never get very big. I had to remove one leaf during the problems I had a couple of weeks ago, but still have some original leaves and 3 new ones. I was hoping that this would grow faster. The pictures on the Tropica website are of a plant much taller than what I have. I know that's probably after months of growth and I am only 4 and a bit weeks in, but I had thought it would grow quicker. The growth rate is listed as medium and size 15-30+ cm's. My concern is that if the Limnophila H. now gets going and the Echinodorus does not, then it may end up being too shaded. I'll have to see how that goes, but with it being a small plant and deep substrate it has a long way to reach to get to the Tropica substrate at the bottom. With it being a root feeder, I bought some Seachem Flourish Root Tabs and pushed one in by its roots just in case it will appreciate some more localised ferts.
With all the uprooting, I then drained off a further 20% of the water to clear out crud and ammonia released from the substrate, then refilled with fresh and fired up all the equipment again. All looked good apart from a few smaller bits of Alternanthera that did not have deep enough roots to handle the flow, but I caught those and replanted and they are still in place this morning. I dosed a little extra macro and micro last night to help compensate for the water change, then back to normal dosing of Macro this morning before I left for work.
