Can you mix heavy feeding and lower feeding plants?

[paigee]

Hi Everyone! 

New here but long time follower of Aquarium Co-Op. So as some background, I'm a novice fishkeeper but inexperienced planted tank-er (lol). I want to get several easy keeper plants for a 5 gal aquarium. The plants I was looking at are Annubias nangi, pogostemon stellatus Octopus, and maybe some type of foreground plant. I read that Octopus are heavy feeders however annubias are not. How do you dose fertilizer in this case? I have both root tabs and easy green leftover from my last failed attempt at planting a tank. Is it possible to fry the annubias from too much fertilizer if I dose the water column? Also any advice related to setting up a planted tank is appreciated! I won't do fish for a bit until my plants are established, and then maybe add 1 or a couple shrimp.

[Rita]

In my exerience over feeding ferts should not hurt your plants at all... but you most likely will grow a ton of algae. Of course lighting also plays a factor in how fast/much algae will grow but my best advice is to just start of dosing once weekly and use the aquarium co op test strips before each dose to see what the nitrate level is. This will help guide your dosing frequency. I tend to keep heavily planted tanks with low light plants, but I've needed to start dosing some tanks twice weekly because some plants started showing deficiencies and after a week my nitrates were testing near 0ppm.

[nabokovfan87]

On 1/5/2023 at 4:29 PM, paigee said:

The plants I was looking at are Annubias nangi, pogostemon stellatus Octopus, and maybe some type of foreground plant.

check, check, and.... check.

Definitely works.  Ultimately others can elaborate but think of it where the loudest mouse gets the cheese.  PSO can grow fast, so it will grow fast and may out compete other plants.  Anubias will be fine in just about any tank as an accent.  It's not the type of thing where you need to have a "low demand" tank for anubias or anything.  I don't think of plants in terms of demand, each plant has it's own needs, but I try to think of plants in terms of growth rates.  This means that as your PSO grows, then it has the ability to use more nutrients in the water and that would then starve out or present issues for other plants.  PSO does really well with light, grows tall to get that light, and then grows so crazy it practically has bark. (I just mean really robust growth, thick stalks, sturdy plant.

Having some fast growing plants actually helps out compete algae.  It just means that when it comes time to trim, keep that in mind. Trim those plants so that other plants aren't blocked out.  Just keep an eye out to make sure plants at the substrate level and plants at the mid level can get their light. Of course, as mentioned above, then you can dose a little more if you need to.