What Is Happening Here To My Swords?

HI everyone! I’ve recently made some upgrades to my 20 gallon planted tank and suddenly my swords are dying?

I’ve been dosing excel flourish daily and excel once a week with water changes and that was working for some time. Plants were growing but slowly of course so I wanted to upgrade...
I switched the stock LED light to a Finnex Planted+ 24/7 and increased excel to 2x a week. Lights have always been on 12hrs a day. So far the plants seem happy (wisteria and Ludwig are going nuts) and there’s very little algae but my swords are slowly disintegrating. Does anyone know what’s going on?

 

More light means a higher rate of photosynthesis which means plants need more nutrients. Your sword is hungry from increased light!

Swords are a rosette plant that don't really feed from the water column, instead being heavy root feeders. If you don't have a nutrient rich substrate, pop 2-3 root tabs under it. I would also consider dosing a more complete fertilizer as Flourish is only trace and lacks potassium, phosphorus, and magnesium that many plants require more of.

 

swords are heavy feeders, and it appears they have a micronutrient defiency. Your plants look like they are needing pottasium and or nitrogen.

 

Do either of you have an all-in-one fertilizer that you would recommend that will help with the general health of my aquarium plants? I did not figure that Excel wouldn't be enough.

I will add root tabs today and hopefully that will help the swords in the meantime.

Thank you!

 

Do either of you have an all-in-one fertilizer that you would recommend that will help with the general health of my aquarium plants? I did not figure that Excel wouldn't be enough.

I will add root tabs today and hopefully that will help the swords in the meantime.

Thank you!

Dry ferts are the best tbh, but can be tedious to dose. Easy Green or Nilocg Thrive are two I see used a lot. I use Easy Green and it is good, but it's not been enough for my tank full of heavy root feeding crypts so I'm back on dry ferts

 

I still use seachem, which is one of my favorite brands. go on their website and look at all the fertilizers they offer. I recommend at least getting the macro nutrients also with what you already have.

 

Dry ferts are the best tbh, but can be tedious to dose. Easy Green or Nilocg Thrive are two I see used a lot. I use Easy Green and it is good, but it's not been enough for my tank full of heavy root feeding crypts so I'm back on dry ferts

Do you think Easy Green coupled with root tabs for the crypts and swords would be a sufficient combination? Looking into dry ferts makes my head spin. I'll keep the simplicity of a squirt bottle

 

Do you think Easy Green coupled with root tabs for the crypts and swords would be a sufficient combination? Looking into dry ferts makes my head spin. I'll keep the simplicity of a squirt bottle

For lightly to moderately planted, yes. If you have almost every square inch of substrate planted like I do, stick to dry ferts.

 

I'm using the thrive bottles. One is for micronutrients, one is for macros. It's easier for my wife to take care of the tank that way while I'm gone. Just 6 pumps for my 65 gallon per day of one or the other and everything seems to be growing ok. You still need tabs for heavy root feeders though.

 

Swords are root feeders so root tabs will do wonders over anything you put in the water column. My Swords exploded when I used Flourish tabs. I switched to DIY Osmocote Plus tabs about a month ago and it took a while longer to see any benefit but they've just started doing better recently.

*Edit*
Flourish Excel is a CO2 substitute (carbon). Flourish will feed plants.

 

Thrive by nilocg contains the macros and micros you want in one easy pump dosed bottle. (You can get separate EI liquid macro/micro bottles, but thrive in and of itself is an all in one) Plant food by ultum nature systems has the same composition.
Easy green is ok with K, but low on NP.
Flourish is great as a micro...

Make sure you have some root tabs in there as well