Stem plants won't stay planted

So... obviously a bit of a newbie question.. but I am having troubles getting my stem plants to stay down. A lot of them are down, but some of the hornwort in particular seems to float up every day. What am I doing wrong?

The substrate is those little clay balls. I am wondering if I bought the wrong size of balls. The store that sold them to me is mostly focused on plants, so I took their word for it. But the balls seem a little big. They don't keep things trapped down well.

Or maybe there is something else I am not grocking. Help?

 

Hi BigBeardDaHuZ,
To help get a few roots on off cuts before they are planted in substrate. Tie anything heavy on the bunch of off cuts. Dropping them in a tank so they are vertical.After a couple of months there should be roots on the lower third.
Floating a stem plant at the surface flat horizontal for a couple of months will grow roots all the way along the stem. Strange as it may seem a horizontal flat stem will in time sprout branches all the way along it. Half burying a horizontal stem with roots all the way along and small vertical stems growing gives a row of new plants.


Sorry I don’t have the answer to working with the clay ball substrate. I ended up caping it with gravel in my lounge tank . And going bare bottom with pots of balls again capped with gravel .

 

So... obviously a bit of a newbie question.. but I am having troubles getting my stem plants to stay down. A lot of them are down, but some of the hornwort in particular seems to float up every day. What am I doing wrong?

The substrate is those little clay balls. I am wondering if I bought the wrong size of balls. The store that sold them to me is mostly focused on plants, so I took their word for it. But the balls seem a little big. They don't keep things trapped down well.

Or maybe there is something else I am not grocking. Help?

What I would recommend is pick up some pebbles from your garden. Boil them to kill anything on them. Then use string to tie the bottom of your plants to the pebble. Be gentle.
Then put the pebbles just under the substrate so they can't be seen. Voila, no more floating plants.

 

Well, it sounds like I'm being impatient. Thank you. That helps a lot

 

I use plastic bottle tops, you can use different sizes for size of plant, cut an X in the top & push your thumb through to widen it, turn it over so it's like a saucer push the plant stems gently through the X (you can tie them together to make this easier) & then push the bottle top beneath the substrate, the substrate fills the bottle top & anchors it down.

 

I use plastic bottle tops, you can use different sizes for size of plant, cut an X in the top & push your thumb through to widen it, turn it over so it's like a saucer push the plant stems gently through the X (you can tie them together to make this easier) & then push the bottle top beneath the substrate, the substrate fills the bottle top & anchors it down.

Huh. That's a very cool idea.