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Planted tank and adding fish:

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27K views 6 replies 6 participants last post by  iliketogolf  
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#1 ·
I am starting my very first planted tank...some other websites that I have read up on, suggests that you fully plant your tank before you add any fish so that you can monitor your tank and the levels when you have live plants taking in nutrients. It seems from my research that O2 is where the issue is...because the plants can take O2 away from the fish at night. But I already have air stones hooked up to add extra O2 to the tank, so do I need to fully plant the tank first?

My birthday is in 2 weeks and my boyfriend is buying me my first fish for my 29g tank. But I just recently decided that I wanted to try a planted tank this time, so can I add a few plants this week...watch it next week and then add the fish the week after? Or does it not matter? Can you add plants at any time, whether the fish are already living there or not? I just don't want to mess this up, and I'm patient...just want to know what I should do first.

Thank you!
 
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#2 ·
The best plan is to plant the tank heavily, an individual stem plant about every square inch of the substrate, right at the beginning of setting up the tank. Then wait a week or so, and add a small number of relatively hardy fish. Many of us add corydorus catfish or ototcinclus catfish as the first few occupants. Wait another week or so and add a few more fish. Do this until you have all of the fish you want in the tank. I have started all of the planted tanks I have had using that method, with no problems yet.
 
#3 ·
You can add plants at any time, however, it doesn't have to be before you get fish.

With modern filtration, O2 is not nearly the concern it used to be. Really the only issues can be on CO2-injected tanks at night, and I always recommend anyone injecting CO2 into their tank to run an airstone at night to encourage higher O2 levels and prevent CO2 poisoning.

If you're setting up a low tech tank w/out CO2, then the current from your filter [as long as it's an appropriate size for the tank] should be enough, day or night.
 
#4 ·
part of the prob is cycling the tank and keeping an eye on the ammonia levels. if you use substrate from another tank along with filter media it wont take as long. if you plant really heavily where it looks like a jungle it wont take nearly the time to cycle as it would just letting it sit and run fishless. the down side to that is if you plant the plants in the sub and try to remove them later you can pull every thing up and make a mess in the tank. if you want to use the plants to help get things like hornword java moss and duck weed to help it along and just float it.
 
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#5 ·
Yeah I have already been doing a fishless cycle for about 3 weeks now. I was going to put in fish starting this week, but then realized that I wanted to try a planted tank and move all of my artificial plants back into my empty 10 gallon tank which has also been running on a fishless cycle for about 2 weeks now. I wanted to add the plants over time, but I already have a list of which ones I would like to get. Thank you all for your help :D
 
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