Master Your Midground with These Easy Plants (4k)

Imagine an aquascape with a beautiful hairgrass carpet, some nice bogwood and then a carpet of ballast in the background. It looks okay but there's something missing and that thing that's missing is the mid-ground. We have the mid-ground of the hardscape but there's no mid-ground plants to act as a transition from the foreground to the background. So we can use plants to do that and in my mind the best plant family in the world to do that is cryptocoryne species. These are perfect for mid-ground. There's so many species available that are grown to the perfect height of the mid-ground and they are low light tolerance usually, low maintenance. They grow in a rosette formation so they're not like stem plants that need constant trimming and replanting. The only maintenance they really need is just by removing any excess growth by peeling away that leaf from the rootstock. This is one of the biggest reasons I love crypts because they give the high impact but for low effort. You just have to be patient with them because they are quite slow growing and I think that a lot of people are put off by them, by the fear of crypt melt. So we'll talk about that later. So today we're going to use my Oasiscaper line 60 here as an example and we're going to use three species of crypts. First of all we have in the tropical one to grow cryptocoryne undulata broadleaf. We'll talk about the individual species in more detail as we plant them. Then we have the biggest, this is cryptocoryne wendatii brown and then we'll keep that in there, stop it from drying out. And then finally cryptocoryne petchi. Now the really interesting thing about crypts is that they're always a little bit of a surprise. They tend to change their colour, their leaf shape, their texture depending on the conditions that they're kept in. And even in the same aquarium you have the same plant they can look very different. For example in my Hyline 400 I have cryptocoryne nurii in one side of the tank, it has a slightly different colour and texture than the plant in the other side of the tank. So it's just a really interesting plant and it offers surprises and novelty which I really enjoy in aquarium plants. So we'll prepare the the plants now, we'll go into some detail, but before I do that I just wanted to talk about the differences really between the ones who you grow or in vitro plants in general and potted plants. So when you when you see these in the shop, especially if you're a beginner and you're not experienced with aquarium plants and the different products that are available, you may see this and you may look at a regular pot and think oh I'll definitely get the pot because it's bigger. However don't be fooled into into assuming that because even though it is bigger in terms of its height you generally don't get anywhere near the quantity of plants relative to an in vitro cup, especially the Tropica 1-2 Grow. In my experience you tend to get between three and ten times the amount in terms of plants in a 1-2 Grow cup versus a regular pot and there are lots of other advantages about the 1-2 Grow or in vitro in general. Tropica tend to grow the vast majority now of their 1-2 Grows in a liquid growth media. This is a special liquid with nutrients and potentially growth hormones. It's still a bit of a secret what the actual recipe is, I can't really reveal that, but needless to say it's a liquid and it's very easy to prepare. You literally just need to rinse that liquid away. The older kind of style of in vitro products tend to come in like an agar jelly which is like I say like a jelly and it tends to take a little bit longer to prepare and is a little bit more messy. So if you can always look out for the the 1-2 Grows, especially the liquid makes it really really good. Another huge advantage, now this is a game changer for me, of the the 1-2 Grows in the liquid is that that plant is almost ready to grow underwater because it's been grown in its own liquid in a basically in a mini greenhouse in here but in a liquid. So the plant can immediately begin growing in your aquarium. Now I say immediately because in contrast when you buy a potted plant they have almost all of them have grown in greenhouses out of water. We call this emergent growth and they're grown hydroponically so the leaves themselves are exposed to the air, there's more light obviously in the greenhouse so no algae of course from the leaves because they're growing in the air, lots of CO2 in the air, so there's huge advantages of this. They're more robust because the plant has to support its own body weight in the air as well which makes them more safer for transit so you know they're just more robust so they're not going to get kind of knocked around and damaged so much. When they're grown hydroponically it's just the roots that are grown in a rockwool in the pot sat in a tray, basically a huge tray with circulating nutrient-rich water around the base and that feeds the plant roots and feeds the plant. You can get some beautiful specimens this way but the potential challenge is when you put that emergently or hydroponically grown greenhouse plant into your aquarium it actually has a really hard time adapting to its underwater world so it literally has to change its body, it has to change its physiology to be able to utilize the nutrients, the CO2 and the light underwater because it's a completely different environment to growing out of air of course and you can see you can see this in real time for instance in my little waterfall tank here we have Hygrophyllis cephalum which is growing out of water, the plants, the leaves have hairs on them and there's flowers growing but if you look at the underwater version it's almost a completely different plant to look at, different colour, there's no hairs, not producing any flowers so visually they're very different because they've had to change. Now during this change the plant is using so much energy into converting itself into this new form, during this it's leaving the door open to algae. If you imagine algae as like a opportunistic parasite almost, it needs the same things as plants, it needs light and nutrients so if that plant that's going through the struggling to get all the energy to change while it's doing that it's not using the light and nutrients but algae is able to. Also during that kind of energy transfer it tends to kind of shed leaves and especially with crypts you may have heard of crypt melt so often the plant will actually drop its leaves or the leaves melt away and then hopefully if you have appropriate aquarium conditions and a healthy rootstock that plant will then produce new leaves which have been adjusted to grow underwater. So that's a huge advantage of the ones who grows especially the ones that have been grown in the liquid media, they don't need to go through that huge transition from out of water growth, emergent growth, to submerged growth, underwater growth. If you want to have plants that grow immediately almost in your tank, especially in a new tank, then do consider the ones who grow. You get more quantity, they adapt better, of course there's no snail eggs, these have been produced in Denmark's own sterile laboratories so absolutely no chance of snail eggs, no algae, no pesticides, no disease, whereas you always run a little bit of a risk when you're buying potted or bunch plants. So a little bit of an advert there for the Tropica One Two Grow but they do sponsor my channel and I do work closely with Tropica and I genuinely believe these are the way forward for plants because we're not actually having any impact on the wild stocks either and that's another issue, another video for another time. So if you do have the opportunity please do consider Tropica One Two Grow. So let's prepare them now and then we'll plant them and then we'll show you what the scape looks like when it's finished. So let's start preparing our Cryptocoryne undulata broadleaf. Really simple, peel off the lid and then the plant should come out in one whole portion. Pull it out gently, pour away the liquid media, let's focus on the plant, there we are, and then what you'll see is lots of individual plants with all their roots kind of tangled up and then what we can do then is separate this into individual portions. So you have to be quite firm with it, it is quite tricky to do so hopefully you've got some fingernails, if you haven't then you might need to use some sort of tool or get someone to help you. So just dig your thumbnail in between the root mass there and then it should just kind of start to come apart quite naturally hopefully, there we go, and then we've got probably at least three plantlets there which we can separate again. Now what you can do now is if you just squeeze the root mass it should help, you sort of just push, squeeze it quite firmly, it should help to separate everything. So we'll just pop that back in the bucket, the bucket's just below me and then carry on doing that, here we go, and you can see there's quite a lot of individual plants, you can actually get probably 10 to 20 individual crypt plantlets out of a one two grow pot. So we continue with that process, we've got another big plant mass here and then like I said before if you give it a bit of a squeeze you might damage the odd leaf here and there but all of the energy is stored in that rootstock to grow new leaves so don't worry if you damage the odd leaf. You can see it's in its kind of submerged state already so this is going to adapt to your aquarium almost immediately rather than the potted versions and we just keep repeating that process until we've got as many plants as you wish. If you're on a tight budget you know you can actually keep dividing, keep dividing and get much more coverage with that one plant. So that's what I'm doing here and this will grow to up to 30 centimetres, I do have some of this in my Highline 400 and as I said at the beginning of the video they can just change its colour, change its texture and size depending on the condition so you get a general idea of the maximum height which is what you want to know really for your aquascape, you kind of want to know what that final height that they'll get to is. So if you do have any excess root growth you can trim to around a centimetre or so and that's just going to make the planting process much easier for you. Trimming the roots does actually encourage new root growth as well, you'll find the roots look really kind of tangled and that's because they've just been grown in that confined space of the cup and just repeat that for all of the other plants and don't forget to have fun doing this, don't rush it, it's not a chore, it should be seen as a hobby, we're doing this because it's a hobby, a hobby is designed to be doing something for the joy of it, not to make it hard work, it's a fun process, think about what you're doing, just pay full attention, take your time, we live in such a busy, rushed world, expected to do this, that and the hobby in my mind is the perfect antidote to the stresses of the modern world, you know, whether it's aquarium plants or gardening or cross-stitch, World of Warcraft, personal favourite is Gran Turismo 7, let me know in the comments if you're into Gran Turismo 7 and we can have a race sometime, as Grant Gwynne will tell you, he's a big fan of the channel and I'm a good friend of Grant now through the connection of the PlayStation 5. Okay so that is all of the undiluted prepped, what I'm going to do now is just going to pop that all back in the pot, it's really important that we don't let tissue cultured plants dry because that will really damage the plant tissue. Sorry about the autofocus, it's a Canon camera, not as fancy as Sony, but you know, I've been in the Canon ecosystem for over 20 years, 25 years now probably, I've owned the Canon EOS, so obviously I've got all the lenses that I've been invested in and to change over to Sony now would be a big investment and probably not, it wouldn't be worthwhile, and I'm massively rambling about cameras and no one's interested in those so I don't even know why I'm bothering. It's just here floating, let's crack on with the pots shall we? Okay sorry about that, I forgot to press the record button when I was preparing the pots, so I'll just talk you through what I did. I removed the whole portion from the plastic pot, removed the rock wool which comes apart in two halves, and then you have the whole plant mass, and then separate the plant mass, in this case I got five individual portions, each of the Wendatioi Brown and the Petchi, this is the Petchi here. It's really interesting because you can feel the difference, it's much more rigid, much more robust, it's been grown out into the air you see, so it has to support its own body weight, we talked about this earlier. I've trimmed the roots back to about a centimetre to make the planting process easy like before, and yeah let's plant them now, talk you through where I'm planting them, why I'm planting them there, and what we can expect in the longer term for the scape. Okay time to plant, now I want to think about the final height that you want to achieve of the plant, so actually the Underlata Broadleaf is probably going to be the tallest, so think about that, do you want the height at the edges of the scape, do you want it all at one end, and then think about sloping, or do you want it in the middle and go for a kind of island composition, so these are all considerations, so in my case I want to accentuate this, the height in the centre, so it's a bit counterintuitive because they're the smallest at the moment, the Underlata Broadleaf, because they want to grow, but they will eventually get much taller, so we just pop those in there, and they're going to be invisible for a little while, and that's okay, they tolerate the shade, all crypts tolerate shade really, some more than others, but I've kept crypts alive somehow in pure darkness, I had a aquarium in my garage for six months, and there was no light in the garage, and there was hardly any water in the aquarium, and then I came back, opened up the garage, and then looked at the aquarium, and then there was a crypt in there, and it was really healthy, and it actually showed some signs of growth, so they are such an easy resilient plant, amazing, and I've had the crypts in my Hylone 400 now are at least three years old, so they're definitely a long-term plant that you want to keep going indefinitely pretty much. Now I'm actually planting blind here, but that's okay, I'm really confident that they're gonna pop up eventually, and what I might do in this scope in the long term is actually remove the Sagittaria, there is actually Crypt Balansi in there, there's a little bit of Spiralis Red as well, so eventually when that becomes more dominant I'll remove the Sagittaria completely, and then we'll literally just have a crypt foreground, crypt background, and crypt mid-ground, and in the foreground you can see we've just got some Anubias, some Marsilea, there's a little bit of Hygrophyllus cephalum, so now I'm moving on to the, this is the Peche, this is the smallest, so this is going to go on the edges of the aquarium, this will get to about 15 centimetres maximum, but this can turn a really nice reddy brown colour, as I said it really depends on the conditions, so it's going to be a bit of a surprise, now ideally we'd have more portions but we don't, so here's what it is, so now we're on the Wendatei Brown, and that's going to go just behind the Nurii that's already there, and I have a little bit over here, a little gap there to go in between, perfect, so this escape is hopefully going to be running in the long term, now I am attending the RHS, the Royal Horticultural Society, it's a big show, I think it's the second biggest show they do of the year after Chelsea, English people will know what I'm talking about, and they are keen to feature aquascaping there, so I'm very excited to be able to show off one of my aquascapes, I'm not sure which one to take, should I take the nature aquarium style, which is this one here, or should I take the Dutch style, so the Dutch style will probably be higher impact, you know, and a bit more in keeping with English kind of gardening, but it'd be nice to show off the nature aquarium concept as well, so let me know in the comments, what would you like to see at a gardening show, Dutch style aquascape or nature aquarium, what do you think would be most popular with an audience that aren't familiar with aquascaping, that's a good question, so there we have all the crypts in the tank, and now it's just a case of waiting for it to grow, doing regular maintenance of course, I will follow up on this with a 50% water change, that's really important because every time you disturb the substrate system and release a load of organics into the water column, that can potentially lead to triggering algae, so always follow that with a water change and that dilutes those waste organics and mitigates that risk, so there we go, crypts, the perfect mid-ground plant for almost any aquascape, suitable for any level of aquascaper or aquarium keeper, very robust, very adaptable to a wide range of aquarium conditions, water chemistry, lighting, they'll grow very well in high light, very well in low light, always a surprise how they're going to turn out in the long run, just bear in mind that end height because that's what you're aiming for, with stem plants you can adjust the height with trimming etc, but with rosette plants like crypts, you're waiting for them to determine their own size, so it's just a bit of research required, I do recommend checking out the Tropica website or app which is free, and you can see the the size ranges that the crypts will achieve, there are around, easily available in the hobby, probably 20 crypt species, ranging from the smallest which is the Cryptocoryne parva, all the way to the tallest such as the Balansi or the Eustaryana, and then the foreground extreme at the parva, and then the background extreme of the Eustaryana, and then almost all the other species are mid-ground like Willisii, Lucens, all the Wendatei species, they're probably the easiest that you can get, and so many different colours, textures, they're just a beautiful plant, don't be put off by the crypt melt, feed them well with liquid fertiliser, but more importantly with a good substrate system, if you haven't got one then you can just use nutrition capsules or root tabs, so that's, yeah, that's the video guys, mid-ground crypt masterclass, hope you enjoyed it, let me know if you want more kind of masterclass videos, really happy to bring these kind of style of videos to you, I hope you enjoyed it, I've really enjoyed bringing it to you, take care, see you in the next one, cheerio.