don't you hate it when you buy a bunch of aquarium plants with this dream of making a
beautiful aquascape and they all end up dying yeah after years of struggling with keeping
aquarium plants alive I've narrowed down my top seven beginner friendly favorites that are cheap
and hard to kill hi my name is Irene with girl talks fish here with practical tips on nano fish
and planted aquariums and number one on my list of bulletproof plants has to be anubias i find them
slightly easier to take care of compared to java fern which I'll talk about later on in the list
but they come in many many varieties i think my favorites are coffeefolia because it has those
like rippled leaves of course anubius nana petite because they're so tiny and very versatile in
aquascaping and then this large mystery anubius that i put in Sonic's take and he uses like a
better hammock really cool they are great because they don't require any kind of special substrate
you can attach them to rocks and driftwood using super glue gel and they can easily live off of
low light and liquid fertilizers unfortunately because they are on the slower growing side
they are prone to getting algae on the leaves so ways you can combat that is plant them in
the shadowiest shadiest part of your aquarium farthest away from the aquarium light you can
use things like floating plants that will not only suck up the excess nutrients in the water but also
provide more shade for your anubius and then get the help of algae eaters such as narrate snails
the second plant on our list is the dwarf aquarium lily and i would consider it
like the prettiest plant on my list just because you can see in a tank full of greenery
the leaves really stand out almost like the showpiece the centerpiece of this tank
i want one almost in every one of my aquariums because these red brown leaves that are kind of
triangular arrow shaped there's some on the bottom some in the middle and then it can send lily pads
all the way up to the top some weaknesses to be aware of is sometimes you will get a
dwarf aquarium lily bulb and it may end up being a dud where it never sprouts so
if you bought it from a reputable company like aquarium co-op they will send you out another one
for free so that's good to know and then another thing is if you notice little holes in the leaves
that is a sign that the plant is getting really hungry is not getting enough nutrients so make
sure to plug in more root tabs down below or use some kind of nutrient rich substrate to feed it
number three on the list is pogostemon stellatus octopus and I promise I'm not just going down the
list of all the plants in this tank i really do like it because you may have heard of the adage
where faster growing plants tend to die faster if you're not giving it everything it needs
versus slow growing plants are slower to die and a little more forgiving if you're a beginner and
so because of that i have not traditionally had a lot of luck with fast-growing plants stem plants
especially such as I've killed bacopa, ludwigia, moneywort you name it but pogostemon stellatus
it refused to give up on me it was so it was one of the only stem plants i was able to
keep alive for a very long time it is a faster growing plant but i feel like it was slower to
die compared to even water sprite or wisteria i really like it because it provides a lot of cover
for fry especially in this tank the platy adults like to eat in the offspring they make just give
it as much light as you can and liquid fertilizers and it will grow to its heart's content it's also
very easy to propagate like most stem plants you just trim off kind of the upper half replant it
somewhere else in the tank and that will become a new plant the only weakness i can think of is
maybe if you're running like a highlight co2 tank and really pumping those nutrients and light to it
it's probably going to grow out of control within a week so you'll have to do a lot
of pruning in order to make sure it doesn't kind of outshade outcompete the other plants
number four on the list is a floating plant amazon frog bit so personally i actually like
the appearance of other floating plants better such as dwarf water lettuce and red root floaters
but when it comes to the needs of a beginner is it hearty does it grow easily is it hard to kill
amazon frogbit is definitely the one i vote for it will like many floating plants suck tons of excess
nutrients from the water and use it to create more leaves and little plantlets reproducing
very quickly but unlike other floating plants like duckweed the amazon frogbit leaves are a lot
bigger so they're really easy to remove in fact i just every time i do a water change i just take
some out every time it doesn't get out of control frogbit likes to grow really long thick bushy
roots that are great for hiding fry although i do sometimes accidentally break them when I'm doing
water changes if I'm not careful so sometimes what i like to do is contain the frog bit
in a ring of airline tubing and that way it's easy to move them around and get them out of my way
speaking of breeding fish and shrimp I gotta have a moss on this list so number five on my beginner
plant list is Christmas moss i chose it because it's compared to some of the other mosses it's
cheaper more readily available i feel like it's a little less messy looking compared to java fern
they don't have a lot of requirements they can survive in low light use liquid fertilizer doesn't
necessarily have to be in substrate in fact you can attach it to hardscape or it often comes on
a piece of mesh and once it really gets going you can start selling it for profit so in my case i
actually had it in my cherry shrimp breeding for profit tank and i noticed that it was getting
really thick and dense and so i just would trim off uh the tips i would use sewing thread and wrap
the moss around kind of squares or rectangles of black craft mesh and then once that section
the new section started propagating and growing thick enough then i would sell them at my local
fish store for profit so really cool you can sell shrimp and moss from the same tank
at number six we are finally getting to java fern so like anubias it is cheap hard to kill it
doesn't require substrate it can live in low light and just use the all-in-one liquid fertilizer
but the reason why i had it later on the list is because some people have had trouble just growing
java fern and having it thrive for some reason there's just been a lot of reports of browning
leaves and then when the plant is in distress a lot of times the leaves will grow little
plantlets off of it in hopes that the plantlets will eventually float off and grow somewhere else
where the conditions are more favorable i had this giant java fern over here up in the front
and at some point it's just started getting a lot of holes in the plant leaves and even though i was
using an all-in-one fertilizer through various water tests i found out that at least for me i
have soft water so i needed to add more minerals into the tank in the form of seachem equilibrium
as well as i was really low in potassium for some reason so i feel like this java fern it really
likes that high potassium environment and once i started dosing that it has stopped developing
holes and new leaves are finally starting to form so no more little baby plantlets everywhere
for my last category on this list okay so a lot of people like my coworkers Lizzie and Cory they
just love cryptocoryne plants i want to love crypts but they don't always do well for me
um a lot of beginners they are confused by crypt melting where you bring home a brand new crypt you
put it in your aquarium and all the leaves fall off you're like what what just happened because
they the crypt plants they are very sensitive to environmental changes so when they go from
a plant farm being grown out of water emersed to being submerged into underwater completely
in your tank they don't like that and they have to shrink back and grow brand new leaves to recover
now i expected crypt melt when they first get into my tank but what happened for me is
when i started adding more potassium to help that java fern grow grow all of my crypts melted back
and it's been months still and they are still very very slowly growing back like
you can see this plant right here tiny tiny leaves versus this one was purchased
after the whole potassium situation so it still has big leaves and i don't like how crypts
can melt after the fact in fact george farmer has a video where he had these beautiful tall
crypts they melted back for some mysterious reason after being in his aquarium for a really long time
and he actually ended up pulling them out because they take so long to recover and to get to that
height and that growth level so for number seven i am going to not recommend all crypts
but one specific species which is cryptocoryne lucens and i like it because smaller crypts
seem to be less likely to melt compared to broad leaf crypts like a crypt wendtii and the reason
why i didn't recommend crypt parva is because it's much smaller and i feel like it propagates or
grows a lot slower than crypt lucens this is an excellent foreground plant it has these little
kind of oblong smaller paddle shaped leaves and man this thing is has done so well for me as you
may know i've had several aquarium disasters planted tank failures and this crypt lucens
is several years old and has gone with me from tank to tank to take as i keep restarting it
it may melt back a little bit but it readily starts producing new leaves once the water
parameters have uh kind of settled down a little bit so i'm very happy with this purchase
it continues to produce new nodules or little platelets off the side and i can't wait to see
what happens with it uh in a few years from now if you're still having problems keeping
your aquarium plants alive make sure to check out my video on how to balance a planted tank because
i spent two years figuring out that process and i definitely want people to learn
from my experiences take time to enjoy your aquariums and i'll see in the next video