Master Aquarium Carpet Plants With These 5 Tips

Achieving a beautiful carpet is one of the most desirable goals in the aquarium hobby. So in this video, I'm going to give you five tips that are going to help you master growing an aquarium carpet. I've grown just about every variety. I've done them mostly successfully. I failed, so I've learned a lot over the years. But before we dive into the five tips, a little bit of housekeeping. We're getting real close to that 20,000 subscriber mark. So just want to let you know, I'm going to be launching channel memberships pretty soon. The benefits are going to be more of an inside, behind the scenes look at my life, sort of an opportunity to get a little bit more personal and one-on-one with you guys, as well as monthly live streams where I can rate your tanks, review your tanks, give you tips. So if any of that sounds interesting, stay tuned because memberships are going to launch soon. But they are active in the background. So if you want to sign up now, you can. All right, let's get into these tips. Tip number one is a simple one. You want to plant as dense as you can possibly afford from the start. So a tank like this, my UNS45U, which is a nine gallon, features a glosso carpet. I recommend about seven cups of tissue culture on day one. If you're planting like a 20 gallon, fully carpeted, not a ton of hardscape taking up space, you're probably going to want between 20 and 30 cups. So you really, really want to plant dense and then you're going to be off to a great start on day one. And there's all sorts of biological benefits of adding a lot of plant mass to your aquarium when it's still stabilizing and possibly even cycling. Step number two is to deal with the melt as swiftly as possible. So plant melt is one of those things sooner or later as an aquarium hobbyist you're going to deal with. And a lot of the times with carpeting plants, in my anecdotal experience, melt is not uncommon. So the best way to prevent and reduce melt is to get the healthiest plants you can in the first place. If you're getting old tissue culture plants that have been sitting on your local fish store shelves for weeks and they're looking suboptimal, it's not worth any sort of a discount. They're just not going to make it. You really need perfectly healthy tissue culture plants to sort of mitigate chances of melt. That said, even with healthy plants, you can still get melt. We don't know exactly why plants melt. It could just be a standard part of the adaptation process, could be a million and one factors, you know, specific to your aquarium, but melt happens. When you see it, you want to just trim off any affected tissue right away so you're not having ammonia accumulating in the tank. And if you find that the actual roots of the plant and the plant matter that's in the substrate is melting, you really just want to pull that out because it's not going to recover at that point. So deal with any melt as quickly as you can and just be prepared to replant. With this carpet in particular, I had some pretty bad melt. I just made another small order of plants and replanted about two to three cups. And then at that point, the tank was a lot more stable. No further melt. So get past that melt phase. I know it's frustrating. I know it costs money, but you got to deal with it sometimes. And sometimes you get lucky and you don't have melt at all. Tip number three is to stabilize your tank. Now that you've planted, got through that melt sort of danger zone, it's time to make sure that your tank is stable so we can set the carpet up for success. So a lot of the time in the first few weeks of an aquarium's life, you're dialing in the lighting, you're dialing in the CO2, you're dialing in the ferts. By this point, you should not be touching those things. We need to give your carpet very, very stable parameters and conditions so that it can properly root and hit that critical mass where it's going to start to take off. So make sure at this point things are absolutely stable and stop touching things. A lot of my clients, they'll come to me when they have suboptimal plant growth and a lot of the issues are they're just constantly adjusting the lighting, constantly pulling back on ferts. Do not do that at this point. You've already dealt with your melt. You've already planted. Things should already be dialed in. Tip number four, at this point, it is time to trim religiously. So with a lot of carpeting plants, they sort of struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle. Then they just take off and start growing like a weed, including this glossow. So once things are healthy, stable, you've got no more algae, no more melt. Now it's time to get into that regular cadence of trimming because this is how you're going to make your carpet look like a carpet. Because once things are stable and you've got your conditions steady, it might not quite look like the carpet you see online yet. And this is where the trimming is going to take it there. So the more you trim, the more you stimulate what's called lateral growth, which is that carpeting effect. In the beginning, a lot of carpeting plants, especially glossow, they tend to grow kind of upward because that's just the path of least resistance. So that regular trimming, and at this point I'm trimming this pretty much every time I get my hands in the water, that's going to promote tight, compact, bushy, really beautiful carpet growth, the type of stuff you see online. So trim as often as you can once the plants are stable. And finally, tip number five is to keep your substrate nutrient rich. So a few months into an aquarium's life, it's very possible that your plants have depleted the excess nutrients that are in that soil. Maybe you set your tank up with a nutrient rich aqua soil, added some root tabs, eventually those nutrients are going to be depleted. And of course you're replenishing the water column with your liquid dosing, but it's also important perhaps every three to six months to renew the nutrients in the substrate. So this is where I recommend adding some root tabs and that'll keep your carpet happy. But just look at the plants. If you start to see any yellowing or deficiencies or holes or poor growth, that could be a sign if everything else is steady, that your nutrients are lacking a little bit. So that final tip is to just stay on top of that. And once your carpet hits this point, you've done it. You've made it. It's easy. It's just a matter of keeping on top of the trimming, keeping your parameters steady. You know, you don't want any major fluctuations and just making sure they have everything they need in the form of macronutrients and micronutrients. So let me know if you think I left out any carpeting tips. Love to hear from you guys. Just a reminder, memberships are launching when I hit 20K. They are soft launch in the background, so it's going to enable me to travel more, do longer videos. It's going to up the level and quality of this channel. So thank you for your support in the meantime. If you like my content, go ahead and like the video, subscribe to the channel, hit the bell and I'll catch you guys and gals next time. Bye bye.