Do you know how hard your water is? I use rainwater in the tanks and Vallisneria won't grow for me either.
My water is actually quite hard, about 8 GH (I bought a GH & KH test kit 2 weeks ago) so hopefully that will be beneficial to some plants I try to grow. I only recently learned that cardinal's prefer very soft water and I debated going down the RO route but that's going to open a whole other world of problems IMO, I'll try and learn plants first then maybe go down that route in the future but my cardinal's seem to be doing great tbh.
Right, thats a waste of money. CO2 has to be applied continuously during the photoperiod (when the plants are "inhaling" CO2) and in proper amounts. Arguably the most stunning tanks are CO2 injected, but I wouldn't recommend going there until you mastered the low-tech domain and when you do, you will have to consider if you want to deal with the complexities of CO2 injection.
Yeah I kind of knew in the back of my head it was probably a waste of money but it was a desperate act of trying to have a planted aquarium I guess
I would switch over to a complete fertilizer as suggested by
@sparkyweasel and
@dw1305, such as TNC Complete. Vallisneria are prone to melting when dosing liquid CO2 so you might want to stop that if you want to keep the Vallisneria - happened to me several times until I was told about the adverse effect to certain plants and mosses.
Okay so this advice seems consistent throughout this thread, so I've stopped dosing liquid CO2, and I've bought a bottle of TNC Complete (ofcourse Amazon wouldn't deliver it to me so I had to get it of eBay, no next day delivery
) I looked a little in to this TNC Complete whilst I was in work last night and I was seeing the term "double triple dose".. Whats that about? Should I just dose the reccommended to begin with? 1 ml / 10L and see how it goes from there?
I highly recommend adding more plants to the tank, its always beneficial... More Vallisneriia, Swords etc. Go for plants in the
Tropica easy category.
Trust me, if I can nail this and actually get plants to thrive in my aquarium my cardinal's will be living in a freaking jungle
26 C is unnecessary high. My cardinals and other tetras, shrimps and plants are doing just fine at 23.5 - 24 C - and Cardinals in
their natural habitats are routinely found in waters that are 23 C. At lower temps your slowing down the metabolism of the tank (fish and plants), increasing the amount of dissolved Oxygen and CO2. Not much, but everything counts.
Strange, I always believed cardinal's preferred warmer water, it's insane the amount of different information on the internet. I'll maybe drop the temp a degree or so for now and see how things go.
I am not a big fan of having direct sun light hitting my tanks. It's not necessarily always a problem, but it can cause uncontrolled algae blooms... I would limit it.
I'm not a fan of sun light on my tank either, but unfortunately I don't have much of a choice right now as I've recently moved back to my parent's whilst I save for a mortgage and beside a window is the only place for my aquarium
I have pulled the curtain's on about 70% of the window to limit the light, I guess I could pull them all the way but I don't want to sit in darkness all the time.
I just grabbed this quick picture of my tank right now with no CO2 and completely inert sand as substrate, to show you that you dont have to have soil to grow plants
I definitely have to feed my plants well, since nothing is in the substrate, they depend on water column fertilizer for their needs.
It might be not all plants will like your tank, but a majority will. Ive failed with vallisneria before, I think my water is too soft.
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I see you have gotten great advice already, I would try out what they say before any substrate change.
Damn man, that is a beautiful low tech tank, that's some motivation right there to get mine heavily planted
What plants have you tried previously? Do you have plant preferences? Your javafern looks very healthy. With your tank, I'd be tempted to consider some branchy wood for towards the back and tie on a nice selection of anubias. That would give you some height and they are easy to grow. I've also seen people use small pieces of wood stuck with suckers to the back glass to make a nice back wall of anubias. Some crypts e.g. wendti are easy too - I'd second having a look at the tropica easy category.
I can't remember the names of them unfortunately, the only one I remember is the Limnophila sessiliflora, but yes I'm planning a whole rescape soon (everything except the substrate), I'm going to my LFS this friday to pick up some bits of drift wood and other bits and bobs and I'll probably re-work this tank within the next month or so. I just want to see if I can get plants to grow first before going and buying a bunch and watching them all melt.
