keeping plants planted

[ChunkStyle]

Hello fellow aquarists
I keep a fairly well-planted tank including a pictus cat, a banjo cat, a rubber eel, a senegal bichir, and a cory cat, so there is much snufflng around the gravel. I am sick of planting and replanting my skinny stem plants because even with lead weights, they still get dug up farily frequently. What are some methods y'all use to prevent this from happening? thanks
-B

 

[HarleyK]

Howdy and Welcome to MFK,

First of all, I always recommend against keeping those lead weights. Heavy metals are not our friends ...

Try weighing your stemmed plants down with a rock. Just put it on top of them. That'll last for a while. Rooted plants like Cryptocoryne can be protected by rocks around their roots, too. If nothing else helps, put the plants in a flower pot and weigh that down with some rocks.

Good luck,

HarleyK

 

[illustrae]

I knew I would have this problem with my pleco, so I specifically designed a tank that would have lots and lots of anubias attached to bogwood. However, I wanted more height, so I covered some terra cotta pots (dirt cheap at the garden center of a department store like Wal-mart) in silicone and gravel, filled them with laterite, and buried them in the substrate and planted some vals, egeria, and crypts in them. The pleco leaves them alone, and the plants thrive pretty well. I have a friend who does something similar with ALL of her plants by planting them in little pots or glass cups. This way she can move them around without disturbing the plants for cleaning or re-scaping her tanks.

 

[guppy]

Lose the weights, I like 2 methods. First, planting is small pots, some are available that even look like rocks or you can silicone gravel to them to make them less obtrusive. Second, using a planting disc made of pressed peat, this is less noticable but also less effective if your fish are diggers.

 

[Calgone]

My Red Belly P's flip out from time to time and love to knock my swords up. My favorite method has been the potting method that all of the above have been mentioning. It keeps the root structure of my plants in a containable place, adds more of a base surface area to make the plants harder to dig up, heavier, and extremely manageable with trying new setups with your tank.

 

[ChunkStyle]

thanks folks, looks like its to the home n garden store for me

 

[guppy]

I like the low, rounded pots used for bonsais.