I really love aquarium plants they're so beautiful they help to purify the water so
I don't have to do water changes as much but I personally find them a little bit
harder to take care of compared to fish so if you've got a black thumb like me
let me tell you about some of the ways that I have killed plants so that you won't have to
for my dwarf aquarium Lily a lovely plant comes with a bulb I found out that they
definitely like a lot of root tabs so that would be the first way that if you see the leaves are
starting to get holes or I'm melting try to put more root tabs in and see if that helps
however if you have a tank like this one that is full of floating plants another way that you can
get your Lily plant to die is if they're not getting enough light so it will send up lily
pads up to the surface and you want to make sure that the floating plants aren't so crowded that
they're not getting enough light speaking of floating plants they too need a lot of light
or also melt away but another thing that makes them melt away is actually if the current is too
strong so I actually had a Sponge Filter that apparently the air pump was too powerful for
them and so they ended up melting away from the bubbles that were popping and then once
I switched out the air pump to something a little bit weaker than they did just fine Amazon swords
or really any plant that needs to be rooted firmly in the ground on when you first get
them and you put them in make sure that you help block them off from any fish that will dig them
up or accidentally bump them away because I had some dwarf chain loaches that are just you know
pretty active fish they tend to dwell on the bottom and they just kept hitting this sword
plant so that it would float up and it never really got a chance to develop because of that
also anubias anubias is one of those plants that has a rhizome meaning that you don't want to bury
it into the substrate and instead you can attach it to Driftwood or rocks and one of the ways you
can attach it is super glue very very effective however make sure you don't cover that rhizome
entirely with super glue otherwise it will suffocate it may end up melting away and dying
instead I like to apply the super glue to the roots of the anubias and then push it down and
then leave that rhizome completely free of glue cryptocoryne plants absolutely beautiful does well
in low light however they really don't like to be moved whether you're moving them to a different
location or you're putting root tabs under them and it kind of causes it to shift this will cause
some of their more fragile skinnier roots to break and they become very unhappy when that happens
I also want another case with crypts where I had the light on too strong for them when they were
mostly a low light plant the tank was not balanced and they ended up becoming completely covered in
hair algae which will prevent the leaves from photosynthesizing and therefore the plant can't
grow or Live Well stem plants on the other hand while you can plant them into the ground sometimes
because they're such a fast-growing plant they have a harder time with the conversion process
so you may have heard of you know a lot of these plants that we grow in aquariums they actually are
grown on the plant Farms as out of the water or emersed grown and then we take them to our tank
and then we plunge them down into the water and then they have to convert into submersed grown or
underwater grown leaves and stem plants can really suffer and even completely melt away to the point
where you have no plant left so to help them out with this conversion process a lot of times I will
float the stems at the surface of the tank so that they can get lots of light lots of carbon dioxide
directly from the air the stem will grow and then they'll grow roots kind of all along the stem
once it's nice and big and healthy then I will consider planting it into the ground and has a
better chance of surviving because it actually has roots speaking of stem plants one of my favorite
one is Pogostemon stellatus 'octopus' because it has those nice long tendrils that grow out great
hiding place for a little baby fish that is how it was the first time I ever discovered that I had a
mineral deficiency in my soft water so the tops of the leaves of that Pogostemon stellatus ended
up twisting which is a classic sign of Calcium deficiency and then once I added some Seachem
Equilibrium into my basically fertilization routine never had that problem ever again so
it didn't really kill the plant but definitely the tops of the leaves of the stem plant weren't doing
great and then the last one java fern classic beginner plant that a lot of people including
me have had problems with because the leaves keep turning black or brown and there's a lot
of reasons why this might happen for me personally I needed to start feeding a really good all-in-one
liquid fertilizer for example like Easy Green that has lots of potassium in it because apparently
java fern really likes potassium and the bigger it gets the more it needs this and to the point where
I ended up getting a potassium extra supplement to add on top of to my all-in-one fertilizer and
once I did that it started growing really well in green now I don't want to scare you from getting
aquarium plants in the first place so make sure you check out my five things I wish I knew when
buying new aquarium plants take time to enjoy your aquariums and I'll see in the next video