Rotala trimming removing bottoms

[Slick_Nick]

Hi everyone I re did my 29g almost a month ago now I removed a bunch of dragonstone and added a piece of driftwood instead to make more room for plants. Now I’m just trying to get some balance back. I added a couple new species of rotala and they are going to be due for their first trimming soon. I never thought much about it before but obviously I received the plants and the bottoms still have the emersed growth on them so after I trim the tops should I leave the bottoms in to try and produce more or is it best to just trim the tops remove the bottoms and start with all fully submerged growth? You can tell the old bottom growth on the red rotalas especially. Hopefully it makes sense and any help is much appreciated! 

[Guppysnail]

When I trim rotala and ludwiga I leave the ugly bottom in and it produces new shoots. It looks horrible while doing so though. Here is a clipped group ludwiga left the tiny right sprout is rotala. Once they get bigger with roots of their own I trim away the old. 

[Slick_Nick]

On 4/15/2022 at 10:14 AM, Guppysnail said:

When I trim rotala and ludwiga I leave the ugly bottom in and it produces new shoots. It looks horrible while doing so though. Here is a clipped group ludwiga left the tiny right sprout is rotala. Once they get bigger with roots of their own I trim away the old. 

Thank you Guppysnail I will definitely keep the bottoms in for a while then and just trim and re plant the tops. I’ve struggled to get other rotala species to turn red so now that I finally have success with this one I want to be able to spread it out more. I appreciate your help 

[Minanora]

I leave my near naked stems as well. Usually I cut them shorter and they make branches of new growth.

[nabokovfan87]

I just watched a video by Corvus Oscen about stem plants and maintenance. It was something I never knew about how to "correctly" maintain them. Needless to say my tanks always had bare sections on the bottom and now I know how to handle that moving forward. 

 

[Slick_Nick]

On 4/15/2022 at 11:53 PM, nabokovfan87 said:

I just watched a video by Corvus Oscen about stem plants and maintenance. It was something I never knew about how to "correctly" maintain them. Needless to say my tanks always had bare sections on the bottom and now I know how to handle that moving forward. 

 

That is a good video thank you! My problem isn’t bare stems I just got a couple new species of rotala that have been adapting to my water so all the lower parts were emersed grown and the tops are submerged growth now adapted to my water. I’m gonna trim them soon and see if I can get some more shoots coming off of them before I eventually pull out the bottoms and dispose of them altogether. You can see the bottoms the leaves are still round shaped and green. The green rotalas beside them I’ve had for a while so they are fully submerged growth