Tips for growing pearl weed & bacopa?

[ouray1]

Hello! I have a 10-gallon aquarium with a filter and heater as well as a aquarium light for planted tanks. In this tank I have just a guppy but plan to get mountain minnows or something similar. I'm growing currently 15+ stems of pearl weed and four bacopa plants.  For substrate I'm using stratum for fertilizers I have excel and potassium. I usually leave the light on for 8 hours a day. The reason why I'm writing this post is because with my smaller 5 gallon aquarium i used the same lighting substrate fertilizers etc. yet no growth with the pearl weed? I'm trying to hopefully here in the next few months to try and get to it to the point where it's self-efficient.  Should I do constant water changes or something else?

[Kurt Brutting]

I had Pearl Weed in 2 aquariums myself and in one tank it thrived and grew like crazy. The other one it was barely hanging on. I started floating it and it took awhile, but it started turning around, slowly! 
I also float Bacopa to get it started, once I see new roots I will bury it in the substrate. Now I float both plants at 1st just to get them established. 

[nabokovfan87]

I don't think the height on the tanks is different to cause something like the light settings being a major issue. 

Considering the newness of the smaller tank, potentially there is just a bit of a transition on the plants mixed with the soil trying to establish itself.  I would be intrigued at the GH/KH of both of those tanks.   With regards to both of those setups what is your normal maintenance routine, how long have they been setup, is there any major filtration differences?

I assume, but I just wanted to clarify.  Is the smaller tank made up of trimmings from the bigger tank or is it new plants?

[ouray1]

1 hour ago, nabokovfan87 said:

I don't think the height on the tanks is different to cause something like the light settings being a major issue. 

Considering the newness of the smaller tank, potentially there is just a bit of a transition on the plants mixed with the soil trying to establish itself.  I would be intrigued at the GH/KH of both of those tanks.   With regards to both of those setups what is your normal maintenance routine, how long have they been setup, is there any major filtration differences?

I assume, but I just wanted to clarify.  Is the smaller tank made up of trimmings from the bigger tank or is it new plants?

So basically, the plants and everything are brand new I just transferred my fake plant tank aquarium to a planted more self-sustaining tank its the first week so far i'm not sure how i should go about water changes or dosing fertilizer (excel)

[nabokovfan87]

1 hour ago, ouray1 said:

So basically, the plants and everything are brand new I just transferred my fake plant tank aquarium to a planted more self-sustaining tank its the first week so far i'm not sure how i should go about water changes or dosing fertilizer (excel)

First, flourish Excel is an algaecide, similar to something like Easy Carbon.  Second, given it's a new setup it will take time for the plants to grow in.  If you have something like aqua soil substrate you'd want to track your GH/KH over time and then proceed with water changes:

Week 1: nearly every day.  For mine I didn't have a ton of soil and a pretty big tank, so I did 2-3 changes the first week.
Week 2-3: 1-2x per week
Week 4-5: 1x per week.

Again, a lot of this is based on the substrate pulling nutrients from your tapwater, how much, etc. This is where monitoring those parameters comes in useful.

You would want to have some sort of a liquid fertilizer, potentially root tabs for the plants you mentioned.  You'd add in the tabs every 1-3 months based on when you're seeing the plants struggle again.  Liquid ferts, I dose in 1-2x per week. 

[ouray1]

On 6/24/2023 at 12:14 AM, nabokovfan87 said:

First, flourish Excel is an algaecide, similar to something like Easy Carbon.  Second, given it's a new setup it will take time for the plants to grow in.  If you have something like aqua soil substrate you'd want to track your GH/KH over time and then proceed with water changes:

Week 1: nearly every day.  For mine I didn't have a ton of soil and a pretty big tank, so I did 2-3 changes the first week.
Week 2-3: 1-2x per week
Week 4-5: 1x per week.

Again, a lot of this is based on the substrate pulling nutrients from your tapwater, how much, etc. This is where monitoring those parameters comes in useful.

You would want to have some sort of a liquid fertilizer, potentially root tabs for the plants you mentioned.  You'd add in the tabs every 1-3 months based on when you're seeing the plants struggle again.  Liquid ferts, I dose in 1-2x per week. 

Should I do a 50% water change? Everyday I'm very new to this planted hobby so im a bit confused

[nabokovfan87]

On 6/24/2023 at 4:25 PM, ouray1 said:

Should I do a 50% water change? Everyday I'm very new to this planted hobby so im a bit confused

My apologies about the confusion!

Alright so the main process going on is that when you first add aquasoil (like the stratum substrate) it has a lot of organic particles that are leached out into the water.  Sometimes you can just add aquasoil to the tank, depending on which one, but most of the time you want to do water changes to remove all of that excess.  When you first add the tank, you'd change water nearly every day.  The next week less often, etc. 

During this process the soil is also absorbing minerals from the water column (KH and GH particles).  This has to do with Cation exchange.  From Tannin Aquatics Blog, here is a brief explanation of the whole process.

Quote

 

What is "CEC?"

Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) is the ability of a material to absorb positively-charged nutrient ions. This means the substrate will hold nutrients and make them available for the plant roots, and therefore, plant growth. CEC measures the amount of nutrients, more specifically, positivity changed ions, which a substrate can hold onto/store for future use by aquatic plants.

 

In order to add in minerals you would add in new water via water changes, while some of the excess organics are removed during that same progess.  This helps to keep algae down and prep the soil for the plants.

Ultimately, you're just looking to get the setup phase done and then focus on how the plants do following that. 

Secondly, you'd want to look into a liquid fertilizer like Easy green to use with your tank.  There are a lot of options out there, what you'd want to find is something that is an "all-in-one" fertilizer to make it easy to use.  Something like Seachem's line of fertilizers requires a lot of different bottles and can be very difficult to keep consistent.