Under Lean dosing thread
Post#
#103
It was already confirmed that this plant can be grown under higher dosing, especially when the GH is high, higher Fe/Micros can be dosed. but Marian doses for NPK are rather not that high, even though he uses Fe/Trace at bit higher levels along with GH of 5-7 range.
Sudipta growing them in non Co2:
His Non Co2 tank
if this plant truly needed very high co2, then it should totally fail to grow under Non Co2 tank, Sudpita tank with high lights, lean dosing, rich Substrate (NH4 based). Not only you don’t need high Co2, you also don’t need high nutrients in order to grow this plant under the high lights.
Tom Barr’s Garage Tank with Co2, No Liquid fertilizer Dosing, old aqua soil can be found
here
in this case both Sudpia and Tom’s Ammania Golden both look like they are growing much better than what you usually see in most High Tech, high dosing, Co2 enriched tanks. And am not referring to thickness of the leaves or stem, but overall health of the plant. Where in rich co2 they will obtain thicker leaves and stems.
Plantnoobdude experimental tank can be found
here
every time he made changes to the nutrients, weather the ratio or the nutrients levels, plant responded differently. His goal was to grow all these plants together under the same setting of parameters because there was a misconception that they cannot be grown together due to their nutrient or Co2 demand. some of those listed plants: ludwigia pantanal, rotala wallichii, ammannia pedicellata golden, tonina fluviatilis, Cuphea anagalloidea
Tom Barr is strong believer of Liebig’s Law and this is what he have to say about the “Ammania Golden” after chatting with Tom Barr, this is what I gathered from him:
Direct quote from him:
“The whole genus is found above the water line. Not even saturated soil but it grows there fine. Might about to find exceptions out in nature but not many. The Ammannia species do well in rich sediments. I don’t need to dose at all this even with old soil. 2 years or more old. Easy to grow. The flip side is full EI and lots of trimming. They are weeds. The Lythraceae family is mostly like this. Some can do great at absent water column ferts. More ferts means more work in many cases. Hence doing away with the CO2 gas as the next step. It grows, but it’s harder to get the nicer richer colors. I’ve used the plantex CMS tub for the last few years, and add the B myself. It’s not an ideal trace but it’s worked and had a long history. Cheap etc. these species can go months on end without any traces added to the water. I get a B little better color if I do add, but totally not needed. You can add A crassicaulis variety and the normal gracilius, the partae/ red Neasea and a couple of others to these observations. Both absent dosing and rich max dosing did well, but more work and trimming water changes etc. if you only have Ammannia or mostly, have Ada soil, no need to dose at all I’d argue. They do not care much about water changes either way. Both extremes seem fine and the plant quality was very high. KH was low, 2 or less dKH. The lower, the better. The genus also grows well at fairly low light. 25-35 umol.
Plants take some time to even out all their rubisco enzyme, generally a few weeks
So if the CO2 is rich, they do not need as much, maybe 80% less. If the tank is non CO2, then they need A LOT! 5-10x more. Takes time to make that and have steady levels of carbon feeding into the growth “
#28
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According to Tom Barr:
Fairly New tank
2x week 80% water changes
KH 1-2
Light was about 140-200
CO2 about 60 ppm
NO3 15
PO4 5
K 20
CSM+B 0.1 ppm Fe, 0.2 ppm DTPA Fe and Fe gluconate, total 0.3 ppm Fe
Total 0.2 -0.3 ppm Fe added weekly
In that tank above we have the following weekly doses of Macro/Micros:
N 3.4
P 1.6
K 20
Fe 0.3
Mn 0.02864
Cu 0.00138
Mg 0.02144
Zn 0.00567
Mo 0.00077
B 0.01225
Tom Barr also said that there was no need to add more, this was Max for most things.
Tom Barr believe that too much NH4 gives too much Branching or side shoots
Tom Barr also suggested using high quality Traces/Fe
Tom Barr also stated that family of the plants the Lythraceae is an abnormality
Chat with Marian:
Direct quote from him:
“It does better in aquasoil. The nh4 should play an important role I have tried it in inert substrate as well. It can grow good if the substrate is at least 2 or 3 weeks old, and if it's not full of organics When the substrate is high on organics, the stem melts. The roots are not growing the way they should be. With no good roots, the plant does not grow healthy
But as i said, it grows better in aquasoil. Everything grows better in aquasoil
I have stopped using aquasoil in my big tanks where i keep my plants collection because i have no time to keep it as clean as it should be. After 3 months, the aquasoil accumulates a lot of dirt which causes a lot of problems, like algae, like melting. I have around 70 species in there and it's hard to keep app of them happy in an aquasoil tank
In inert gravel with Root Caps i can grow them without so many melting problems and without so many algae problems
But for example, cuphea does not grow as nice as it does in aquasoil. or maybe i didn't find a way to grow it in good shape in inert gravel. I am still studying
From my experience i can say nothing about this. I don't think that higher nutrient values can have a bad impact on it. For me it grew nice when i did smaller water changes”
Marian also believes that high NPK will grow plant bigger but didn’t provide any numbers, we could use his fertilizer and dosing for reference. Marian Doesn’t use NH4 in is his fertilizer, he has only done so for some experimental after we have chatted about it while back. Under his urea and lean dosing experiment, he said he obtained very small plants but super healthy plants in his 5–6-month old aqua soil. Here:
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He has also mentioned the following:
Black painted quartz 2-3 mm grain size is his preferred substrate
He also agrees that some of his Ammania weren't looking so good and that he could not grow them any better than this.
The plant can be grown in many conditions
But you need to take in consideration many factors. He also used Sudipta's guides as an example for Ammania
No CO2 will grow this plant very slow and with very short internodes and smaller size leaves
High CO2 will grow it fast, thicker stems, bigger leaves
This is his logic and experience
There isn't a standard
He has grown it in lean dosing as well with high co2, very small plants but super healthy.
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I will repeat again, that this plant can be grown under lean or higher dosing, that’s not the main problem here. This was already demonstrated under the Marschner ratio where using N as Proxy, it was used from 1-7 ppm N range to see if this plant can tolerate those levels under the Post#
#103 While some leave damages started to appear once the dosing got extremely high (N), this plant continued to grow and grew straight leaves.
If someone is struggling with this plant weather under lean dosing or Higher dosing, then the problems are likely to be related to their water parameters, substrate, fertilizers or ratios are likely the cause. This also include the quality of their fertilizer such as Micros/Fe etc. If one is growing them decent under different ratio of fertilizer, this would suggest that their water parameters, Substrate are good to begin with. majority of people who can grow them in higher dosing, usually use NH4 enriched substrate such as aqua soil, which helps this plant tremendously. Weather you dose higher dosing or not, in a meanwhile this plant will continue to benefit from the NH4 and continue to do well. The problem may arise for this plant once the sources of NH4 are completely exhausted, which are usually rare in the aquarium. Because most people are almost never limited with NH4 as it is produced by fish and is naturally occurring process. But the problem here would be that too much NO3 usually buildup overtime, depending on how your tank is setup, the NO3 can be eliminated or reduced significantly by the right bacteria which also reduce or eliminate the NO3 that is being dosed into the aquarium. If one were to use higher dosing, especially Micros, they should aim for higher GH such as higher Ca and Mg levels. This usually prevent or help with the mishap from the Micros and at this point the importance of the ratio becomes less important even though it’s still important.
I don’t see the point why someone need to put so much effort to increase their dosing or co2 just to grow this plant when this plant seems to be growing under lean or even No Co2, you would also be putting your livestock at risk if you have any, just to grow this plant. Based on my own experiment and after gathering the data from most of the well-known people along with those who keep Ammania Golden or other picky plant species. I have gathered the following:
Now am not saying that only higher doseres were the only one who suffered here, even the lean dosers were struggling. But, in comparison there were more people who were successful with Ammania when dosing lean compared to those who were dosing high. Even those who were dosing high and keeping Ammania Golden well, they would encounter random issues with this plant such as stunting or twisting of all or some leave of this plant, in most cases bottom leaves were found to be majorly affected while this was not the case for those who kept this plant under lean or didn’t dose the water Colum and only relied on rich NH4 based substrate. Also, most of these people who were dosing higher nutrients were found to be replacing or adding new soil quite often, some were adding NH4 based root tabs quite often. Majority of those who had serious issues with this plant were dosing quite rich doses such as 0.5 ppm Fe from CSM+B along with very rich Macros.
This thread is mainly regarding how to grow “Ammania Golden” and the primary focus should be “how to grow this plant healthy” and It would be wise to do your own experiments and also gather multiple data from multiple people weather its lean or high dosing and then compare it with each other’s and see where and how we could find the proper solution for this plant. It’s not about competition between Lean vs High at this point.
