Any ideas for carpeting plants that will grow in my tank? Substrate - Eco Complete Planted Black about 2 inches thick Light- Aquael Leddy Smart 2 Planted 6W 8000K
I bought some aquarium grass seeds off of amazon and they started growing in 4 days and look nice. Nice looking carpet plant. Will post picture.
What size of tank do you have? The lighting doesn't look too intense, depending on how deep your tank is, there might not be enough PAR to grow traditional carpeting plants like baby tears. A lot of them need pressurized co2 to flourish as well. If the tank is small, a small scale plant like micro sword or tenellus might work. Dwarf hair grass really needs co2 to do well. In my large scale tanks, I use plants like dwarf sag and stargrass kept trimmed low. The latter is a stem plant and not normally used as a carpet plant, but it grows well without injected co2 and crawls along nicely. It's my favorite plant to use as a carpet. You could also mix two styles and do a section or sections of two carpets.
The reason I wanted a carpet plant was to provide some hiding places for shrimp. Do you think I could plant some hyrdocortyle around the base of my rocks and have it sprawl out? My tank is a 15 gallon so its lit but the lighting isnt very intense.
Anubias nana will grow, almost guaranteed, I have a nana carpet in my 5.5g. But it took 4 years to grow lol. Just saying, unless you are trying to stick to a particular biotope, you could tuck anubias in spots, or at the base of DW. There's a lot of possibilities! What size is your tank and what style of scape do you like the best? Natural, simple, jungle, iwagumi, biotope? Ok shrimp. Got it. 15 gallon. Got it. Is it a 15g high? Or 2ft x 1ft x 1ft? Tx!
I'm actually in the UK so it's a 55L which is about the same Its 46cm long by 34cm high so I think that would be a 15g high? Here is the beginnings of my tank
For fun I took pics of my 15g and 5.5g tanks for ideas. Lol, the 15g doesn't have a carpet, it's Blackwater style, and my skittish gold tetras hide in java fern all the time if I don't sneak up. It doesn't even look like there's fish in the tank in the pic lol. These two are low light tanks. 15g long 5.5g I used to have shrimp in the 5.5g ~18" x 13" 13" is the same depth as my 15g. I have crypt wendtii red in the right front and needleleaf java fern. If I was to add a carpet, I might try tenellus. Or stargrass because I'm bias. Haha This is a portion of my 120g with stargrass as a carpet (when my angelfish didn't start nibbling on the leaves and ripping it out for fun) Just for ideas I had to switch to a dwarf sag carpet still in progress.
Low light plants that do well for me in smaller tanks are: (and I think would work in your 55L): Anubias (different varieties available) Java fern (different varieties available) Bolbitis (African water fern)* Rosette sword plants (red or green osolet, rubin, oriental) Ludwigia repens Rotala rotundifolia Hygro rosenervig Hygro angustifolia Crypts (shorter varieties are wendtii, willisii, lutea) Crypts (taller varieties are balancea, undulata, lutea) There's so many types of crypts that would do well imo in your tank, but those are some I've grown in tanks 18" deep. Crypts in general will stay shorter in higher light and grow taller when crowded or reaching for light. *can get very branchy and fill large areas Carpeting: Stargrass+ Dwarf sagittaria Echinodorus tenellus Microsword Staurogyne repens* Baby tears (HC)* Crypt parva* *maybe, may not be enough light +I used stargrass as a carpet for my shrimp in a 46g and the shrimp population was able to stay alive housed with a pair of electric blue rams. I'm probably forgetting plants, but those are some of the easiest to grow that stay a relatively small size. I omitted plants that grow wild, too tall or take up too much space.
