The Puffer Forum

im hoping to get my 10 gallon mostly covered on the bottom in a ground cover plant so i dont have to bother with vacuuming the gravel anymore... its easier just to take the lid off and use a smaller bucket to take old water out than to get my vacuum thing started. id love to do the same in figgys tank, but i dont know of any ground cover low light plants that can survive in an sg of 1.005

i still vacuum the gravel in my planted tanks to keep pollution down

Plenty of detritus still settles in-between/in the plants. I try to vacuum any substrate between plants & skim over the plants after waving them about with my hand, to loosen any detritus in there.

My 10 gallon planted only has a betta and snails, I just change the water with a small pitcher. My 75 gallon is about 90% ground covered, but I still have to vacuum the grass, moss, sprite, and rinse the sponge. Detritus still settles into/onto things.

It depends. If there's very light with very little waste, and you have low plant die-off, you may not need to vacuum the gravel, and in fact you might just disturb your plants' roots by vacuuming too much. If it's heavily stocked or your plants tend to die off a lot (and therefore shed bits of decaying plant matter), then you'll need to vacuum just as much.

oh ok, thanks for all the replies

Well, yes and no. You do not have to vacuum the substrate routinely in a healthy well- planted tank, but this does not mean that you never vacuum the tank.

Just as in established borders and beds outdoors, periodic thinning and replanting is required. The frequency depends on the particular plants. Stem plants may need pulling and resetiing more than once a year, with substrate vacuuming while they are out. Some ground covers you jut take plugs out and let them renew from the edges or with smaller plugs put back in the center of the open spaces. Val I redo between one and two years, depending on how thick it has gotten how fast. I remove up to one-quarter of the total mass at any one time, vacuum, and replant the cleaned ares less densely. Swords I pull and do wedge cuts out of the roots about every second to third year. Crypts are highly variable - when the clump gets heavy and grows less tall, it is time to pull the clump, divide the plants and vacuum the substrate while they are out, replannting with more space for growth. This keeps the substrate healthy and unpolluted. It also provides you with asses of plants for other tanks or trade goods.

The only plants I do not reset regularly are submerse Crinums. They have to have the offsets or pups pulled periodically before they matured (or it gets really messy) to control the clump size. Otherwise you have to completely reset the tank every 3-4 years, which is a PITA and may kill some of the large plants. Crinum roots cover the entire tank bottom - pretty much regardless of thank size up to 180 gallons (12 square feet) and within four - five years will cause the gravel depth to go from ~2" to 4-6". Unbelievable root masses on those plants. I do shallow vacuum the gravel routinely - the roots are deep, not shallow.

There is no such thing as a tank without upkeep. It will go heavily polluted if not renewed regular. Live plants help, but they too require thinning and re-panting. The old root masses around swords are among the worst polluters if not tended - resulting in iron precipitation and sulfide generation. That is potentially hazardous toi the tank and its inhabitants.

There is no such thing as free lunch.