My plant are unstunted, which factor did it ?

[eminor]

Hello, I have a 120 liter aquarium that has 120g of tetra initials sticks recourt of baked clay, the aquarium has been running for 4 months.

During 1 month I used the estimative index which did not suit me the plants were completely stunted. I switched to the lean dosing method with urea and KNO3, it was already much better but some plants continued to be stunted.

I found the topic "Rotala Killer" which is a real gold mine, the author had the same problem as me, his co2 was perfect with a drop of 2 pH but his plants continued to be stunted, no way it was a co2 issue. I decided to stop completely the dosing of fertilizers in the water column and I put osmocote under my difficult plants, there must be 10 pellets in the aquarium which is not a lot.

Since then, the pogostemon erectus, the rotala macandra, the ammania golden !! the ammania gracilis are not stunted at all, they grow very well. I thought it was the ammonium nitrate but the osmocote contains only 1.7% with 19..% of urea, i already tried it with tropica fertilizer, not the same result.

How do you explain this, is it the osmocote ?

 

[MichaelJ]

Hi @eminor, Very interesting... Looks like you found the solution to your problem, perhaps... How long have you been using the Osmocote?... Do you see the return to regular/normal growth to perfectly coincide with only adding the osmocote? You didn't use much (10 pellets which by the regular size is ~1 gram), however you did put them right under the stunted plants it sounds like.

Cheers,
Michael

 

[eminor]

Hi @eminor, Very interesting... Looks like you found the solution to your problem, perhaps... How long have you been using the Osmocote?... Do you see the return to regular/normal growth to perfectly coincide with only adding the osmocote? You didn't use much (10 pellets), however you did put them right under the stunted plants it sounds like.

Cheers,
Michael

I used osmocote a week ago, i've used osmocote in the past, never seen such effect, i though osmocote was not working. I already stopped the use of liquid fertilizer before osmocote, not long before though. The only time i had such good growth was when i used aquasoil.

Maybe plant uptake was from the leaf and when i removed the liquid fertilizer they switched to roots ? there is tetra initial stick below with osmocote now, could be a mix of the two, tetra CEC is 87 ?

Maybe osmocote is leaking in the water column, i would love to know

 

[erwin123]

Congrats on your success with A.Pedicatella, pls keep up the photo updates. Maybe you can also try Tuberculatum again!
Lean(er) dosing + Osmocote under the A.Pedicatella is what I've been doing. One further tip is to spread them out and give them sufficient space. On the other hand, PND can grow them in sand, so there is more than one way to Rome. 🏖️⛱️

 

[eminor]

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Congrats on your success with A.Pedicatella, pls keep up the photo updates. Maybe you can also try Tuberculatum again!
Lean(er) dosing + Osmocote under the A.Pedicatella is what I've been doing. One further tip is to spread them out and give them sufficient space. On the other hand, PND can grow them in sand, so there is more than one way to Rome. 🏖️⛱️

It took so much fail to get to there, if i can grow ammania maybe i can tuberculatum, but i'll wait a bit before before adding the nemesis, i need to be certain that A.Pedicatella grow in the long term. I was done with osmocote, i think it was you who quoted rotala killer tank, took me few hours to read, it was enough for me to try osmocote one last time.

Maybe it's bad to not dose liquid fertilizer but so far so good, will see in the long term. If plant grow even without pellet under them, there must be osmocote leaking somewhere. Plant like hydrocotyle and hetheranthera are still growing quite fast and so healthy. Weird thing is that the co2 is not even perfect at all