# Bad soil for plants ?



## eminor (3 Dec 2021)

Hello, the soil of my aquarium is 1 year old, it is a nutrient base jbl aquabasis plus, I completely put the bag of 5kg in a 51liters, that is to say the double more nutrients, they said it's valid for 5 years, don't think that's true, I covered with a sand of Loire which seems to me with rather fine granulometry, I do not know if it is the soil but I find that the plants have difficulty in making their roots, they take time to develop, is a technical soil would be more successful or akadama soil ?


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## Wolf6 (3 Dec 2021)

With so many people far more experienced then me here I am saying this more as questions, but if soil contains a lot of  nutrients wouldn't roots remain a bit shorter then in poor soil? At least thats what happens in gardening. Rich soil means plants get lazy and dont root as deep. But what makes you say that they dont root well? Carpeting plants are known to mostly have shallow rootsystems meaning they get uprooted easily.


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## eminor (3 Dec 2021)

Wolf6 said:


> With so many people far more experienced then me here I am saying this more as questions, but if soil contains a lot of  nutrients wouldn't roots remain a bit shorter then in poor soil? At least thats what happens in gardening. Rich soil means plants get lazy and dont root as deep. But what makes you say that they dont root well? Carpeting plants are known to mostly have shallow rootsystems meaning they get uprooted easily.


i don't really know but i find it really slow to develop even with co2 and ferts, i always plant them deep to the aquabasis, maybe i should just plant them in the sand ?


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## erwin123 (4 Dec 2021)

What I find great about UKAPS is that you can look at other layouts using JBL Aquabasis:









						Living Roots (101l)
					

Hi, I`m introducing my almost 4 months old tank. It survived brown algae calamity, gree-blue algae and other green algae calamity mainly caused by too strong lighting. Now it is doing pretty well.  Dimensions (cm): 74x37x37  Tech info: Lighting: BLAU Lumina T5HO 4x24W, running just 2 bulbs...



					www.ukaps.org
				




I'm using a 'basic' substrate with less nutrients (Gex Shrimp & Plants soil ) and most of my tank substrate is more than 10 years old (I occasionally scoop up the top layer and replenish with fresh Gex soil). 

Unless you have plants with specialised needs, most plants will happy with EI water column dosing?


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