First planted tank, thoughts?

[beau1990]

So, I've taken the plunge and am giving planted tanks a go this is my first attempt and I'd like y'alls thoughts and changes you would do, because I feel like it looks like a store tank that sells plants. Ignore the nursery it has baby platys in it

 

[TheWolfman]

Looks good. I wouldn’t change anything, let the plants tell you how they want to be. Some stuff will die others will take off. Keep up on water changes and fertilizer.

 

[kno4te]

Like it!

 

[beau1990]

Thanks guys all the plants are from Dustin'sfishtanks, great guy really knows his plants and he's only an hour and a half from my house

 

[Raka]

Moving things around to match the fibonacci sequence would do wonders for moving it away from a store type display.

You can dry the pattern on the glass with a wet erase marker to make scaping simpler. A lot of the planted tanks that are scaped well use a complex hardscape before planting.

 

[esoxlucius]

Looks great so far. I added an assortment of plants to my 180g but I don't have substrate in there so I had to get creative. I potted them all in diy pvc pots (see a couple of examples below). In each pot is just a mix of seachem growing media, fluval stratum and osmocote ferts. The beauty of the pots is that I can move them about.

You will get die off as others have said, some completely, others will look like they're dying off and then come back, so give them time. If, like mine yours is just a low tech set up then don't expect miracles.

You'll get to know which plants are more challenging and better suited to higher tech set ups. You just have to give these a miss until you get the high tech bug.