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LOOSE, BUNCHED OR POTTED?

Most of the time, your best bet (other than buying cuttings from UKAPS members) is buying potted plants from European growers such as Tropica and Aquafleur. Although they seem more expensive initially, the quality of plant is generally very good.

Cheap suppliers who import their plants from the Far East are often a false economy... the plants will be weak and damaged after a long time in transit, and are sometimes known to contain pesticides which can render you tank lethal to shrimp for a considerable period of time.
 
dean said:
dont mean to be awkward but dont you trim the roots off from a potted plant?
so they end up looking like a bunched plant anyway
so are bunched plants equal to potted when we plant them?
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Trim yes, NOT cut off entirely. Its normal to trim them back to about 1cm of root. This stimulates new root growth. Thats different to having a stem with nodes that have to completely generate a new root. I would go with decent potted plants over bunched every day of the week :thumbup:
 
dean said:
Good points been made, I'll have to use my contacts and find some aquafleur potted plants
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Our sponsors AquaEssentials sell them :thumbup:
 
dean said:
Good points been made, I'll have to use my contacts and find some aquafleur potted plants
Click to expand...
my local garden centre has aquafleur, very good prices but narrow selection. could be a place to look if you live near one.
 
I've tried one of the import to order online plant suppliers in the past and was a little disappointed. Crpyts were a single melting leaf, java fern were leaves with no rhizome or roots wrapped in sponge and lead. Even after emailing the supplier I had no response. I know where I will spend my money in future.

Like Bigtom, I'd go for Tropica or Aquafleur pots, bunches are fine for stems, everything else I try and get in a pot especially crypts.
 
Yes, this is all very nice and well, but just a note of caution while everyone seems to get on the Asian supplier bashing bandwagon, it's not logical to decry all Asian plant suppliers just because you have an issue with a particular supplier. There are plenty of good responsive suppliers on the other side of the world, so maybe you just picked the wrong one. If everyone limits their supplier choice to just one or two, what do you imagine might happen from an economic standpoint? Neither Tropica nor Aquafleur for example, supply Blyxa. So where did all the folks who have Blyxa get their specimens from? There are plenty of awesome species that Neither Tropica nor Aqaufleur supply. The reasons are varied, but a lot of it has to do with supply, demand and on their economic model, all legitimate reasons, but this limits the availability of species to us.

This is how we get trapped in The Matrix. The last time you went to the supermarket, how many species of tomatoes did you see on display? Three? Four? There are over 100 amazing and delicious cultivated species of tomatoes and you can only get the plants and seeds from specialist mail order firms, you can't buy the the fruit at Tesco. You have to grow it and harvest it yourself. Supermarkets are engaged in a form of collusion, where, if it were left to them, there would only be one species of each fruit or vegetable grown, because it's cheaper that way. As time goes by, people forget what availability and diversity used to look like so it becomes "normal" to see only a sparse variety sitting on the shelves.

There are plenty of aquatic plant species out there waiting for us to try them, and right now you can only find them from Asian suppliers. If there is a suspicion of pesticides then take the proper precaution and quarantine the specimens when received in exactly the same way that it is suggested to have a quarantine tank for your fish. Sure, delivery times are longer and the plants aren't in the best shape when they arrive, so you have to nurse them back to health. Don't limit your future just because there are some problems. Address the problems or find a way to work around them. Look at the images in the EI Tutorial. 90% of those plants were purchased from Asian suppliers and the economy was not false. The quality of a plant is based on it's genetics, not on it's condition upon arrival.

Cheers,
 
ceg4048 said:
Yes, this is all very nice and well, but just a note of caution while everyone seems to get on the Asian supplier bashing bandwagon, it's not logical to decry all Asian plant suppliers just because you have an issue with a particular supplier. There are plenty of good responsive suppliers on the other side of the world, so maybe you just picked the wrong one.

Cheers,
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Maybe I did choose the wrong one. I spoke to the supplier prior to placing my order and they were very helpful, but once I had paid and received my order, my email outlining the problem plants was never replied too. This was a UK based importer that is often recommended on this forum. This was late last year so I consider it swept under the carpet now. One of the reasons for using them was, as you say, the amount of available species, although many of my choices didn't arrive. o_O

I'm not really bashing, otherwise I would be naming and shaming. But in this case I feel it was false economy. Yes a few species made a great recovery but for the total paid and what was actually usable, I feel I would have been better off shopping elsewhere.
 
Going to a point on page one....about cutting roots.

Crypts and the likes, echinodorus sp. roots can be cut.

Sometimes, from suppliers like Aquafleur, stems can be massive...Rotala springs to mind.

This may sound daft, but I've often cut the pot in half, and used both the top part and the lower part (with no crown)

When stems change their appearance underwater, we can often be left with a lower part which isn't very nice.We then need to trim this stem, and cut off the nice part (at about 6 inches hardscape dependant) This is challenging when trimming the Amano method

It's always a good idea to start of with a stem that's as short as possible.( 1-2grow! ticks this box from the start.) to encourage submerged form leaves that are low down to the substrate.
 
Have to disagree with you a bit here Ceg. I'm all for buyer choice and a competitive market, and have on occasion acquired some decent plants from suppliers in the Far East, but having tried various suppliers and different plants I'd say that around 30-50% of the plants that arrive have been beyond resuscitation. This is generally not a great experience, especially for someone like the OP who seems to be making their first foray into the planted tank world.

As for the need to quarantine plants to protect against pesticides - this isn't something that everyone knows when starting out (I myself lost hundreds of shrimp to this), and as recently exposed on here and PFK, some of the pesticides used are extremely pernicious and long lasting.

So I like to think that I wasn't perpetuating The Matrix with a regurgitation of second hand info, but rather offering what advice I have to give from first hand experience :)

'You pays your money and you takes your chances'.
 
Yep, I agree completely. For a first foray it's definitely better to buy locally, but the statement that you made was unqualified. It would have been better to qualify it with something like "since you are just starting out...etc." Also, since we are aware of the pesticide issue, then that also ought to be include in the response. In that way the response is both informative as well as balanced. That was my point really.

We have to be aware of the fact the plants coming from Asia do take a long time to get here and they do suffer. This is undeniable, but isn't 30%-50% of a plant that you cannot get from European suppliers better than zero? So from the beginners perspective I reckon it would be better to advise that for plants that you can get locally, buy locally and for plants that you can't find locally, get them from where you can, but be aware of these issues.

spyder said:
I'm not really bashing, otherwise I would be naming and shaming. But in this case I feel it was false economy. Yes a few species made a great recovery but for the total paid and what was actually usable, I feel I would have been better off shopping elsewhere.
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Again, I totally understand the frustration of not getting what you paid for mate, no argument there, but just think about it for a second, if you were shopping for species that you could not get locally, how could you have been better off? It could also be that your growing technique was not good enough at the time to get a better yield. We are dealing with living things, not widgets or computer chips. There are certain risks, so the way I look at it is that all I need is for one stem to survive and I can propagate from there. Not ideal, but that's how it goes.

I can get Hygrophila corymbosa from anywhere. I don't need Tropica to sell that, even though I know it will be nice and plump when it gets to me. But where else can I find Eriocaulon, or Tonina or other exotic versions of Limnophilia, Mayaca or Neasea? I'll take that chance mate. 30% survival is better than nothing...

Cheers,
 
Dean I disagree with the bit about buying stem plants as bunches. In a bunch you get less stems than in a pot (at least with Tropica plants that is the case). The other thing is that as potted stems, they will be rooted and can hit the ground running when you put them into the tank, whereas they rarely have roots as bunched plants. I would always buy pots wherever possible. :thumbup: Same goes for Any plants IMHO, not just stems. I usually buy my crypts as potted too. You normally get a good 8 to 10 individual plantlets that way.
 
thats the only problem with forums, you can rarely get total agreement on almost any subject because everyone has diferent opinions and experiences and rightly so ;-]
a few years ago i was thinking of setting up a marine tank and went to very knowledgeable friends and shops and they all gave me different advice so i just stayed with freshwater lol
 
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