What floating plants would you recommend?

[JL316]

I have a 100 gallon tub w corydoras and BN pleco.  Currently looking for plants that would cover the upper portion of the tank.  Can’t have rooted plant due to pleco and want to avoid floating plants (duckweed and etc..). Have success with Java fern but all of Anubias have done poorly.  Looking for suggestions to cover the top part of the tank.

 

 

 

Edited August 29, 2021 by JL316

[JL316]

Currently thinking of pearl weed after watching lrb aquatics

 

[anewbie]

I'd go with frogbits or water lettuce. The roots if left alone can grow all the way to the bottom. I had them in a 5 gallon pail and they reached the bottom. Then i cut all their roots off and put them in my 5 gallon tank and this happened:

 

Btw another option are lily or banana plants.

[Scott P.]

Frogbit works. If you get 5-6 plants you will be covered in a month or so. I trim the roots on mine about once a week. I also have to remove plants often because I only want a small section of it in my tank. I got six plants less than a month ago. I still keep about six in my 20 but the ones I have removed have covered 80% of the surface of my 10g.

[Tihshho]

What do you want the plants for? Coverage for babies or to be nutrient sponges? If you get floating Wisteria that stuff will suck up nutrients and grow like no ones business and shoot of runners. Another option is Guppy Grass, but that stuff is so delicate that if you pull it out if it gets out of control and leave a node, it will be back in force within a month.

[JL316]

@anewbie@Scott P.

do you know which one will grow slower?  One of the reasons why I didn’t want duckweed or salivina is their rapid growth that would overtake the tank

[JL316]

@Tihshhomore for cover for the Pygmy corydoras.  Hoping it would make them less skittish.  Don’t have too much of a preference for nutrient or fry cover.  
 

I currently have guppy grass in my other tanks, wanted to avoid them due to their rapid growth.  For some odd reason, I have great success planting water wisteria but they all die when they are floating..

[Tihshho]

On 8/29/2021 at 7:17 PM, JL316 said:

@Tihshhomore for cover for the Pygmy corydoras.  Hoping it would make them less skittish.  Don’t have too much of a preference for nutrient or fry cover.  
 

I currently have guppy grass in my other tanks, wanted to avoid them due to their rapid growth.  For some odd reason, I have great success planting water wisteria but they all die when they are floating..

I need to do some research to make sure what I'm saying is 100% correct, but there are two types of Wisteria. There is one with finer fronds and leaves and one that is broad. The finer one IME does best planted. The one with wider leaves is the one you want to float. I could be wrong, so someone can correct me, but at some point someone told me they were the same plant and it was all based on how they were grown, but based on the leaf structure I wasn't too sure if that was correct or not.

If your Cory's are being real skittish, you might want to consider adding dithers. Generally adding midwater dithers allows bottom dwellers to be a little more relaxed as that's how they will judge threats. If the dithers go into a hiding frenzy or start to feed then the bottom dwellers know how to respond. When there is nothing else to judge what is going on, bottom dwellers tend to be more shy and skittish.

[JL316]

I didn’t know that!  That’s so cool that their are different variations of water wisteria.

would you know which kind aquarium coop sells on their website? Ideally, I rather purchase it from them.

currently all of the white cloud minnows are outside for my mini project.  Planning to bring them back inside later this year.  Was planning on using them for the dither fish.

Edited August 29, 2021 by JL316

[Patrick_G]

@Tihshho, I think the broad leaf Wisteria is the emersed grown form and the narrow is the submerged. When you put it in the water it will all convert to submerged. In any case it’s a great floating plant that grows fast and is easy to remove if necessary. I think the Coop sells submerged Wisteria. 

[Tihshho]

On 8/29/2021 at 7:35 PM, Patrick_G said:

@Tihshho, I think the broad leaf Wisteria is the emersed grown form and the narrow is the submerged. When you put it in the water it will all convert to submerged. In any case it’s a great floating plant that grows fast and is easy to remove if necessary. I think the Coop sells submerged Wisteria. 

I've grown the fine one emersed and never had it transition to the broad leaf.

[sudofish]

I've been looking at trying red root floater. Love the look especially when the roots get a dark red.

[Patrick_G]

On 8/29/2021 at 4:37 PM, Tihshho said:

I've grown the fine one emersed and never had it transition to the broad leaf.

Ahh, a nice experiment. I have a wisteria clipping and a Wabi Kusa growing out.  I’m  going to stick the submerged wisteria in there and see what happens! 

[anewbie]

On 8/29/2021 at 6:14 PM, JL316 said:

@anewbie@Scott P.

do you know which one will grow slower?  One of the reasons why I didn’t want duckweed or salivina is their rapid growth that would overtake the tank

duck weed is a pia and i would avoid; but with water letuce and frogbit it is pretty easy to remove the extra plants from the surface. Lilies aren't bad and the red ones add a bit of nice colour and you can just cut off the leaves you don't want. Steam plants and such can be a bit more painful because they can require a lot of maint. but floating vine plants like hornworth are not too bad since you can just rip it to your heart content. The only thing is a lot of people have trouble growing hornworth (it grows no matter what i do in my tank). red root floaters grow slower and are an ok plant but it is far more delicate than frogbit and water-lettuce. Personally I like frogbit as it is a little nicer looking than water lettuce but that is personal taste.

[CalmedByFish]

On 8/29/2021 at 6:17 PM, JL316 said:

 For some odd reason, I have great success planting water wisteria but they all die when they are floating..

Just an idea, but this might be because you have more nutrients in the substrate than in the water column. If that is the case, I assume Easy Green would be a solution.

For floating plants, I remember @Irenementioning Amazon Frogbit as the hardest-to-kill floating plant for beginners. 

[Tihshho]

Just keep in mind if you go with Salvinia Minima, it's basically just a larger leaf version of duckweed in how prolific it is.

[kammaroon]

Here's a few more suggestions from LRB:

 

[Guppysnail]

Water sprite and hornwort are my floating  plants that are not surface floaters that piece of sprite has a plant weight sitting on substrate 

Edited August 30, 2021 by Guppysnail

[Guppysnail]

I forgot Brazilian pennywort is a nice top level floating plant 

[Taco Playz]

I love salvinia minima too!

[JL316]

Thank you all for your input! I really appreciate it!!

[Hobbit]

Adding my vote for water lilies! Though hornwort, wisteria, or water sprite would also work great. I personally love salvinia minima too. If you get too much of it, just grab a handful and put it in the trash or throw it in your garden. That’s what I do with mine pretty much every day. It’s like polite duckweed—grows fast and slurps nutrients, but stays in large clumps so if you ever want to eradicate it, you can. The roots also stay really short (which can be a plus depending on your needs).

[Hobbit]

@Nooby haha everyone asks me that 😄 I do bring it to my LFS when I go up there, but it’s over an hour away. Last time I went I brought 12 oz, which is about half a gallon. Not half a gallon of water with plants on top—half a gallon of fairly solid plant matter! 

I live in a very small town in the middle of nowhere. No fish club or anything. And I’m just not up for selling or trading things by mail.

[gardenman]

On 9/1/2021 at 2:24 AM, Nooby said:

@Hobbit should still do it often , good profit

The good profit part is iffy. Floating plants are priced very aggressively on most sites. By the time you factor in the shipping costs, packaging, replacing lost/damaged orders, and transport to and from the post office or UPS Store, the profit per shipment starts to dwindle. I've got two 110 gallon stock tanks literally filled with floating plants (salvinia, water hyacinths, frogbit, and duckweed, photos below) that in theory are worth several hundred dollars. But it would cost me close to that to buy the packaging, print the shipping labels, pay the fees to the selling sites,  haul them off for shipment, keep some in reserve to replace those lost or damaged, and all of the rest that goes with it. I'll gladly give them away to anyone in the South Jersey area, but shipping them out gets a little too iffy. I understand the theory of selling them at a profit, but when you look at the selling prices for floaters on e-Bay, Etsy, and Aquabid, the profit is slim and the hassle is large.

 

[gardenman]

There's also lots of dwarf water lettuce in those stock tanks that I forgot to mention. Those are just the spillover plants from my indoor tanks that I tossed out there rather than throw away. Floating plants grow like weeds. If you're trying to compete in the online marketplace to sell them, you have to price them low and it's not impossible to end up losing money if enough people claim the plants arrived damaged or dead and you have to refund their money.