# Fissidens Fontanus Dry Start



## Wilson

So I bought some fissidens for my dry start tank, and I just firmly pressed them onto my driftwood. I figured that without any water current, the fissidens won't be disrupted when attaching itself onto the wood. Will this work? Am I an idiot? Thanks!


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## Andy Thurston

George farmer did a dry start with fissidens and yoghurt i'll see if i can find a link


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## Wilson

Big clown said:


> George farmer did a dry start with fissidens and yoghurt i'll see if i can find a link



Hey, I think I saw that post already, thanks! I was just wondering if pressing the moss firmly against the wood will be sufficient for it to attach to it.


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## Andy Thurston

You might wash it off while misting, i think it needs to be kept quite wet


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## foxfish

I think it will work fine as long as the humidity and temperature are high enough.


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## Jose

Put some ferts in your mist water and it will spread fast. If you secure it to the object it will anchor faster and better.


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## Crossocheilus

Jose said:


> Put some ferts in your mist water and it will spread fast. If you secure it to the object it will anchor faster and better.



I've heard of people "burning" the leaves of plants doing this...


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## Jose

Crossocheilus said:


> I've heard of people "burning" the leaves of plants doing this...



They probably used an ammonia based fert. No problem if you use normal EI salts, i.e the same ones used in our flooded tanks.


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## Crossocheilus

I think it was standard ei ferts, so no ammonia, however I am not sure and don't have personal experience.


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## Jose

How do you know they just didnt dry out? In sensible concentrations this just doesnt happen. Ive done this even with an ammonia based fert and moss just grew great.


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## Michael W

Hi all,

I have a little experiment going on for a few months no involving growing Fissidens Fontanus on a small piece of coconut via the dry start method. A few months down the line I can say that it is a success as my moss is attached and is starting to sprout new growth in an emersed form.

What I did was I placed a tiny piece of coconut that was moist and lightly pressing some Fissidens on top of it. I then placed no more than 1cm of water on the bottom of this container and closed the container with a lid. I would spray the container every two days to begin with but then I stopped misting. The idea was that the coconut would stay constantly moist due to capillary action from the reservoir of water to the coconut. This will keep the moss constantly moist too, leaving me without having to mist the moss. The fact that the moss was limp due to having grown submersed meant that it would 'stick' to the moist coconut without having to tie the moss, I've never experienced the moss falling off while misting it due to this reason and that I mist at a little distance around 15cm apart give or take.I can't say that I know exactly how long it takes for it to anchor but given time it will.

As for fertilising, I don't do it. This is because I fear burning the moss with the ferts but most importantly I don't believe mosses require a whole lot of ferts. In the wild some of the mosses will grow emersed on rocks and I imagine the moss won't get access to any organics etc until they are either flooded or from rainwater runing down from the banks carrying anything it can bring to the moss.

However, this method in general might be hard to implement on a larger scale and it also depends on the object which it needs to be tied on because it relied on the little water at the bottom of the container and in most cases dry starts don't involved having the substrate some what water logged. In this case if you have room you can try it in a separate container rather than in the tank for the object. The key to this setup is that the object needs to be moist! Rocks are unlikely to work for this as they can't really draw water up.

Foxfish hits a nail on the head in that you can do dry start by keeping the container in high humidity with good temps. But I use this method because I can't provide a warm environment inside the container I'm using to grow the fissidens, so the little reservoir of water suits my needs as I don't want to mist it.

I can try to take a picture of the moss if you want, it will likely be tomorrow.


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## hitmanx

I have great sucess choping it up with a kitchen knife and spreading the paste on driftwood or lava rock, cover tank with saran wrap and sprayed once per day with a couple minutes breathing time... no fertz... it does move around a bit with heavy spraying but eventually it grabs on the growing surface withing a couple weeks...

Works every time.


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## zozo

I did a dry start and used the first weeks Rhizotonic in the spraybottle instead of firtilizer, only used 1/4 of the subscribed dose. After that i started with adding very litlle firt somewaht 1/10 of the subscribe dose. And have to say can't complain all plants are doing very well and look healthy, i had not much die off in the transition to submersed. Less then i expected.

I also use Rhizotonic in my garden for the vegtables and so on, got it from a friend (cant help i'm Dutch, this stuff goes around here) and the plants always root fast and strongly with that stuff. So i tought if the vegies do, the swamps will do as well. So why not, it was the first time ever to use it like this, so i can't say it's an Eureka. But sure will try it again for the next one.

If anyone ever plans to play with this stinky stuff, keep in mind it is very alkaline the water will easily go over 8 Ph when this is added. So it''s better to nutralize it back to ph 7 or 6 with some acid. 

It will also benefit the bacterial start in your soil.


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## louis_last

I don't think dry start is ideal for fissidens fontanus. It takes quite a while adapting to emersed growth and then again once you submerge and it has to re-adapt again to those conditions. From my own experience you also risk mold and the growth rate for F. fontanus seems to be slightly better when submerged. 
I can confirm that the technique of blending the fissidens and then spreading the paste thinly over a large area does work well for propagating a large amount though but air exchange seems to be important, I wouldn't recommend leaving it in a sealed container and yoghurt is unecessary and probably counter productive as it will greatly increase the chances of mold. I grow a lot of moss aquatic and terrestrial and most of the time the various recipes for moss "milkshakes" are less effective than just simply blending moss in water, maybe with a little water retention gel. You can also propagate lichen in a similar fashion but unlike moss it benefits from several additions to the mix.
I'm very lucky to also have mini fissidens (purchased from Living Waters in croydon) which does better emersed than fontanus, I grow it on chunks of bogwood in a large plastic tub with a few centimeters of water in the bottom and an ultrasonic humidifer running. Clingilm covers most of the top to keep the moisture in but I always leave a corner uncovered for fresh air. When I need to harvest some I just rip it all off the wood and after a week or so it starts to grow back from where it was removed.
I've actually noticed with most of the mosses that we tend to use in aquariums that they will 'impregnate' wood in this way, either with spores or protonema. Probably the latter. There was a chunk of wood that I had grown fissidens on which had been totally stripped and left, dry, in the dark for over a year in a cupboard which started sprouting F. fontanus after it was re-submerged.


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## zozo

I think, why even bother to dry start fisidens.. Look how it grows submersed..

This picture is taken 20 of april +/- one day
Left under the snail, nearly nothing there.. I think only glewed 2 or 3 little strings on the wood.




And this picture is taken a minute ago, that's 25 days.. Once it has some roots after a while and starts up, it grows faster then Eruca sativa which we call Rocket Lettuce in our language


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## louis_last

zozo that's impressively quick for it to spread laterally as it has. I think it would take a little longer for me, how much light does that patch recieve? 
Something I keep puzzling over, if anyone has any ideas, is whether there might be a submerged analogue of the blended paste method of propagation? I've experimented with trimming it and just letting the flow distribute the trimmings around a tank with mixed results - you tend to get tiny patches of fissidens cropping up in really wierd places. This plant is very adaptable. I also tried something similar to create a marimo carpet by blending the balls and letting the tiny shreds settle in a zero flow environment with frequent water changes, the idea being that they would eventually knit together to form a beautiful, flawless and uniform marimo carpet but with underwhelming results. The strands did knit together but failed to form any sort of attatchment to the substrate or landscape materials that would anchor them in place. This was particularly frustrating as I have seen numerous pictures and videos that clearly depict marimo growing from a hard substrate and clearly, firmly rooted to the material on which it's attatched.  I also found monoculture impossible under the zero flow conditions described and the cladophora was host to at least three other species of algae. If anyone here has any ideas I'd love to hear them.


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## zozo

Light? OMG now you're cuting a sensitive angle  this is growing under 3 ledstrips 7 watt 600 lumen each. I also dry started my tank for several weeks. The Fissidens came in last the same day as the fill up and that was i believe about 2 weeks before the first picture from above +/- few days. I don't realy know why this rocks like that, its my first Fissidens ever, so it might be the quality also helping a hand. I bought it from Aquamoos.de, i believe that's the growhouse from Flowgrow or Aquasabi dont realy recall that. But their quality plants are very nice and fresh. (Although the Marcandra Mini type 2 quality sucked, but that oe is new for them too) The only thing i did out of the ordenary is as i said in my first reply using root stimulator to spray all over the tank. And i cant help it all the moss and plants are rooting and booming fast and well. Except teh Pogostemon H. and the Utricularia graminifolia that last one is my own stupid mistake. The rest of the mosses like Santa Claus, Mini Pelia and Fissidens go like crazy. The christmass moss i already had to prune for more than 3/4 portion of what i initially did put in there it grows like weed and ruining my scape. I see in the stem plants that my light is at the low side, now i extended it with some more heavely ledstrips 2 x 12 wat extra, for a few days now do not know yet if it does anything better. Th emosses and bolbitis don't care they grow exeptionaly good. Im pruning on a daily basis.. Feel like Sir Prunalot..

I believe in that root stimulator because i have used it a lot on f.e. tomato seedlings and all other seedlings as well and on what i used it did always grow much faster and better than the ones without. So i thought cant be bad for swamp plants, also sprayed on the wood of course where the mosses are.

Soil is akadama if you like to now, so no firts in there in the beginning..


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## zozo

Here you have an other nice patch  same dates. 25 days



With some other mosses..




The mini pelia in the hole in the shades, already did prune as the christmas as well.. See that nice root sticking out that little anubias.. Wonderfull inst it?


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## louis_last

I actually overlooked the fact that you had used rhizotonic in your dry start. One of the active ingredients, cytokinins, does certainly have positive effects on moss growth.


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## zozo

Algea as well,, lol im pruning that also verry much.. darn stuff came with some plants.. Especialy the hair algea.. But its worth the work..


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## mr. luke

F. Fontanus doesnt need to be kept humid to grow. For anyone not aware it is a native moss of the UK (along with 7-8 other fissidens sp.) so it will survive and grow as long as you keep it damp or grow it on something damp. You can also let it dry out 100% and re-animate it and it will act like nothing happened.


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## zozo

mr. luke said:


> F. Fontanus doesnt need to be kept humid to grow. For anyone not aware it is a native moss of the UK (along with 7-8 other fissidens sp.) so it will survive and grow as long as you keep it damp or grow it on something damp. You can also let it dry out 100% and re-animate it and it will act like nothing happened.



I'm also trying to grow the fissidens up my tree above the water, it lives it is green.. But that's about it.. I realy can't see it grow much.. Above the water it in between other vegitation and maybe has more competition. But submersed it's growing faster and stronger, even the patches where it growes combined with pelia..  Even the pelia seems to do better submersed than emersed and in nature it seems pelia isn't even found in submersed form. That's rather remarkable.


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## mr. luke

The 'pellia' we have in our tanks isnt actually a pellia species. Pellia epiphyla (spelling?) is a true pellia that can be found submerged in nature


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## zozo

Ok thanks for clearing that up.. I did read that about the mini pelia at some aquatic plant web shop..


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## louis_last

F. fontanus is a true aquatic, it will only grow emersed if it's kept saturated. The only places you can find it above the waterline is in rocky streams and rivers where it grows in the splash zone or very near to the edge of still water where enough moisture is wicked to it. but you won't find it growing in damp environments away from water.


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## zozo

I have a big bucket in the garden filled with swamp plants.. Lately i saw some moss in there growing on some emersed roots and a portion submersed.. Did put it in the tank it seems to grow well submersed. Im trying that with different mosses now i find in the graden, put it in a gar fill it with water and see how (long) it holds and what it does. some seem to do good.
Realy do not no what it all is.. I see also that Fissidens family is huge, i wonder which one will al do submersed as well.  Funny stuff that moss, i like it..


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## louis_last

There are at least two, and probably more, species of native Fissidens other than fontanus that can grow submerged. Fissidens rivularis and Fissidens crassipes.


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