Potting Up! Leave plants in pots or take em out?

750 Views 3 Replies 2 Participants Last post by dukydaf, Feb 23, 2017

Gilly13

Discussion Starter · Feb 21, 2017

All of my plants are in pots because it was the only thing that somewhat worked with the goldfish. I will be re-homing the goldfish the first week of march to a friend of mine with a large indoor pond at their greenhouse. I am now switching to plant friendly fish 1 pearl gourami, pencilfish, and darters. Should I leave the plants in the pots or take them out?
The pots made it easy to pill them out when i had to siphon the gravel, will i still have to do that with these fish? The pots however made it difficult to aquascape.
Lastly my sword plants are very short the leaves stay very close to base of the plant and never put out tall stems, is this because my water too cold? I use column ferts, root tabs, liquid co2 and have a Finnex stingray 30in, no heater yet, but I plan on buying one.
The plants i have in pots are crypts, onion, hygro, tiger lotus, swords in 36 gal.

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dukydaf

· #2 · Feb 21, 2017

Normal pots for household plants are likely too deep and provide to little surface for our needs. Other fish produce a lot less waste than goldfish, but they still do; thus vacuuming frequency can be reduced.

Since you are doing some basic cleaning of the tank I would suggest go all the way and set it up like a proper tropical tank. It would be less of a hassle to do it now when you do not have fish in it.

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Gilly13

Discussion Starter · #3 · Feb 22, 2017

dukydaf said:
Normal pots for household plants are likely too deep and provide to little surface for our needs. Other fish produce a lot less waste than goldfish, but they still do; thus vacuuming frequency can be reduced.

Since you are doing some basic cleaning of the tank I would suggest go all the way and set it up like a proper tropical tank. It would be less of a hassle to do it now when you do not have fish in it.

That's what I was thinking. I've been told that the tiger lotus should be potted if you want to try and control size, the pot is about 4 in across, which I had hoped would allow it to get big with out taking over the tank.
So I should't have to do deep gravel cleaning with the new fish? Because with the goldfish I could never just siphon the top layer of gravel.
Thanks

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dukydaf

· #4 · Feb 23, 2017

Yes 4 inches is pretty big, however at least in my case the tiger lotus also liked to send roots at the surface of the substrate. I know the trick with the pot works for pond lotuses, let me know if it also works for this lotus.

No need for a deep one , just at the surface. Some people with heavy planted tanks omit this step but then you will see some BBA(Black Beard Algae) . Goldfish are really very messy compared to other fish.

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