Emersed techniques

[susantroy1]

Hey Tom,

I was wondering if you could expand on aquatic plant emersion techniques and the process in which to be successful at this, I recently emptied my 55 planted in order to house my Discus as I build a 135G I recently purchased...Purely by chance I discovered that the plants stems/moss/bulbs all are actually flourishing instead of degrading as I had originally thought they would. I have all of the plants in a 10 G aga sitting covered and sealed in plastic rap in the shade on my lanai here in central FL. Most all the plants have begun to send out new shoots above the 2g of water that I have in there. I seen your post on the 180 setup you are doing with the HC and thought maybe you and other forum members could expand on this technique with other types of plants.

Thanks so much as this technique will be in my 135 build as well


Troy

 

[Tom Barr]

Well, it's not really "my technique", it's just looking at an old method a new way and then suggesting and defending it's use.

You can find lots of information on various methods searching Paludariums and the Crypt pages.

paludarium - Google Search

And

Cryptocoryne

I'm not sure there's really anything to expand on.
Experimentally: you can try all sorts of soils and sediments by using pots in a bare tank. I did this years ago, most Crypt growers do to some extent.
I still do it.

Terrarium and Bog web sites also can tell you a fair amount.

I really have not looked. I just watch natural systems and look at things and then apply what I see. Most every aquatic ecosystem has large water level changes throughout a season.

The plants grow and carpet, then the water level rises and they are submersed for part of the year. Most aquatic plants fall into this group, about 90% or so.

90% is a good number and we can make the method useful to us with about 80-90% of the plants. The remainder of the plants are not hard to grow.

Do not over complicate this method.
It's very much just growing terrarium plants, but flooding it for aquatic aquarium plants later.

Regards,
Tom Barr