THE ULTIMATE AQUARIUM CARPET GUIDE | How to Grow, Maintain, & Trim Aquarium Carpeting Plants

If you're anything like me, the first time you saw a beautiful aquarium carpet, it blew your mind. It's actually one of the things that got me into this hobby in the first place. I was researching how to make an aquarium nice and kind of do a better job than I was used to as a kid. Came across the work of Takashi Amano in the Nature Aquarium Gallery, and it was all over for me. In this video, I'm gonna give you all the tips, tricks, and recommendations needed to grow and maintain a beautiful aquarium carpet in this hobby. We're gonna break down the different types of plants that are gonna get started with your first carpet, and I'm also gonna show you how I trim my carpet live right here on camera. So if you like this type of content, please like the video and subscribe to the channel. Now, without further ado, let's get started with our aquarium carpet guide. So there are a few common aquarium carpets that you'll see in this hobby. The most common are Macranthuma Monte Carlo, Hemianthus Cuba, Glossostigma, Elotinoids, and then Eleocharis, aka Hairgrass. And they vary in difficulty. Now, if you're a complete beginner, I recommend your first carpet should be Monte Carlo. Monte Carlo thrives in a variety of water conditions. It's readily available. You can usually get it at your local fish store, and it propagates very quickly. Now, if you want more of a challenge with tighter, smaller, more compact growth, I recommend going with Hemianthus Cuba. Hemianthus Cuba, however, is gonna require good lighting. I find that it really thrives under soft water, and you're really gonna wanna make sure you're running with CO2. Whereas with Monte Carlo, it's not gonna absolutely thrive without CO2, but you might be able to get by without it. Eleocharis, which comes in a variety of species, some shorter, some taller, is another very popular carpet because it just has that beautiful, grassy, meadow look. It is a species that has given me some difficulty in the past, and it's really gonna depend on your water conditions. It'll certainly benefit from frequent trimmings. And finally, in this aquarium here, I have the beautiful Glossostigma, and this is really popularized by Takashi Amano and the whole ADA crew. They really prominently feature this in the Nature Aquarium Gallery over in Japan, so I wanted to give it a try for myself. And I'm happy to say it's also quite easy to grow, though in the industry, it does have a reputation for being an advanced plant. But that just goes to show you, you really don't know until you try something for yourself. So what kind of parameters do we need to grow a carpet? Well, it's gonna be really important that you balance your lighting, your carbon dioxide, and your FERPs. If you ignore one of those variables, there's a strong chance you're gonna get less than ideal results. So it's really best to set yourself up for success and achieve a balanced aquarium that's fully cycled, runs ample CO2, has high-quality, high-par lighting, and is on some sort of a regular nutrient dosing regime. If you choose to neglect one of those variables, your mileage may vary, but this hobby is certainly not a perfect science. There are some folks who don't run CO2, have crummy lighting, don't fertilize, just have a ton of fish that produce waste and still have beautiful tanks. So while that's certainly not the most repeatable, testable approach to growing a high-quality carpet, you can give it a try if you're balling out on a budget. Now here are a few tips and tricks that you can utilize to set yourself up for carpet success outside of the basic husbandry. Number one tip would be to plant as dense as humanly possible on day one for the best results. If you're just working with one cup of a tissue culture plant and you have to spread it out around a 20-gallon aquarium, it's gonna take a long time to carpet and there might be some melt, and by the time the melt is over, you're not gonna be left with much plant mass. So really buy as many cups or plantlets as you can afford on day one and try and have every square centimeter of that soil covered on day one. If you can spring for a bunch of cups on day one and really plant dense, not only will you get that visual success, but your tank will be in a really good position to beat the algae and thrive. With this tank right here, I started out with 10 cups of Glosso Stigma, which at about an average of 10 bucks a cup, that's gonna run you about $100. So I do acknowledge that that budget is not for everybody. So it's gonna depend on your budget and your commitment to the hobby, but I do recommend starting with as much as you can afford. Now here's another tip, and this is great for somebody who is on a tight budget, but even if you're not on a budget and you're somebody who's extra patient and wants to give themselves that extra line of security, I recommend running a dry start. With a lot of these species, you can essentially just sprinkle them on the soil. Now something like Eleocharis, the hair grass you're gonna wanna plant deep, but Monte Carlo, Cuba, even Glosso Stigma, you can kind of just sprinkle it on moist soil, cover your tank with Saran wrap, wait four to six weeks or even longer if you want things to get really dense, and your plants will grow in an environment and they'll root without any sort of risk of algae and very little risk of melt. The best approach to this is to use tissue culture cups or plants that are grown in the immersed condition. Immersed means out of water, exposed to the air. If they're submerged trimmings or plants you bought from a tank in your LFS, they're gonna have to transition over to their dry phase, which is likely gonna result in some melt. So if you are running a dry start, all you wanna do is spray in the beginning so that little legs of water reach the soil. Make sure you don't overspray or you'll get mold and rotten tissue. And then every day, air it out for a little bit, give things a light spray, and wait four to six weeks. And by the time you're done, you'll have a fully carpeted aquarium that you can then flood, add your CO2, turn on your filter, and you'll be off to the races. And my final tip for you would be to trim that carpet as often as possible. Now you do wanna give it some time to root. You don't wanna plant on day one and then on day five, trim everything down. But once things are at least somewhat established, you know, maybe give it two to three weeks, if you have any melted tissue, if you have leggy tissue, go ahead and give it a trim, and the plant is gonna come back bushier, healthier, and more vibrant. In this tank in particular, I experienced some pretty bad melt, especially on the carpet. So about three to five weeks into the tank's life when the plants were a little bit rooted, I just hacked everything way down. Make sure not to pull anything out of the soil, but you can hack it way down, and it just came back totally beautiful. And as you can see now, it's just super lush and thick, and I have to trim it every three weeks or it just gets out of control. So I'm in that perfect harmony with this, and that took some time. So speaking of trimming, I wanna show you now in real time how I trim my aquarium, what my techniques are, the tools I use, and how I go about doing it. So let's get started on that. All right, so my go-to tool when I'm starting to trim the aquarium is a pair of curved scissors. Now, you could probably get away with using any sort of scissors, but curved scissors are gonna be the backbone, and they give you that extra leverage. So you don't have to put your hand down completely flat. You can go down at an angle, and then that little curve will do the rest of the work. So you really just wanna get started anywhere. Maybe you can be a little bit more organized and go left to right or right to left, but I just really get started. And you kinda just wanna take off that top level and then work your way down. Corners can be a little bit tricky, so take your time there. And of course, watch out for your livestock. I've got lots of shrimp in here, so they're grazing on the galasso carpet. So you're just gonna give them a little leverage, but to be honest, never in my eight-plus years of keeping planted aquariums have I ever cut a shrimp or fish. They're just really good at dodging scissors. They're too fast. So you can see I'm kinda just working my way over. And something you wanna be really cognizant of when you're trimming is that you're not pulling on the plants, especially if it's a relatively new carpet. If you pull upwards, you might dislodge your plants, which isn't fun. Also, I did something really silly. I forgot to turn the filter off, so I'm gonna do that right now. Alexa, turn off 60U filter. So you always wanna trim while the filter is off because you don't want the trimmings getting sucked up into the aquarium. That's gonna cause a lot of debris to get accumulated in your filter, and then you're gonna have to do maintenance. Instead, you shut the filter off, you shut the CO2 off. It's also a good idea to drain some of the water so that you're not splish-splashing, but I'm gonna be extra careful today. And when you're done trimming, you're gonna really take a good 10, 15 minutes to scoop everything out of the tank because you don't want this tissue just sitting there. I mean, with something like Glosso, it would actually work hydroponically and grow roots, and then you'd be able to replant it, but if you're part of the fish club or you have friends that need trimmings, it's not a bad idea to save them and propagate them. For something like this, I don't have a new aquarium I wanna start right away, but if I did, I could put them on some soil and kinda dry-start them, put them under a light, could just be like a cheap office light, put some Saran Wrap on there, give them a good spray down, and in a few weeks, they would build all sorts of new tissue that I could then pull out and start a new tank with. So not a bad idea to keep your trimmings. Around rocks is an area you wanna be really careful because you don't wanna just be cutting the rock and dulling your scissors, so it's a good idea to take extra time around there. And depending on the plant, they might actually start to anchor onto the rock and create a really natural look, which I tend to really admire. So the Glosso does that a little bit, but because it's kind of like a larger clover, I do find it stays in its place around the soil. And you can see behind here, I have Eleocharis, a really tiny species of it, and it's kinda mixing its way in. So the more you trim, you'll kind of encourage that mixed look, which is really cool. Things look really natural. And you can see this guy over here is enjoying himself, taking a little ride while I trim. It's totally cool with me. One thing I really like to do when I'm trimming a carpet is put on some YouTube or a podcast, you know, catch up on something long form. The thing I like about trimming is it's really meditative because it allows me to get in that flow state. And there's just such tangible, beautiful results when you're done. You know, a lot of the things we do in life, they can be a little bit more abstract in terms of their results. You know, maybe you're building up your career, you're networking, and you don't always see those results. But a lot of times with aquascaping, of course you do have to exercise patience, you just get such amazing results. While they're not always immediate, you know, you put the labor in and the results do show up. And it's one of the things I find really satisfying about this hobby. You know, I could have a tank that's not doing well, covered in algae, and I give it a good 30 minutes of my time, some trimming, some scrubbing, and you just get such satisfying results. So it's something that personally brings me a lot of joy, kind of grounds me. If I'm going through like a rough emotional state or just not feeling that good, I always know when I get my hands in my tank. I'll probably be feeling at least a little bit better by the time I get out. It's not gonna fix everything. You know, you always wanna address the root cause, but there's a good chance I'll be feeling a lot better and maybe it'll give me that energy to jumpstart my day a little bit more. So you can see we're getting close to the other side of the tank. So I'm gonna work my way over a little bit more. Shoulders getting a little tired. And again, you know, I'm not going down quite as much as I could because I wanna take my time, but there doesn't necessarily have to be a rhyme or reason to trimming. You can do it at whatever pace works for you. And that's kind of what I'm doing here. This is the rough part, right? It's gonna look nice and scraggly, and then we'll go back over it and do some fine trimming. It's kind of like editing a video, actually. It's like, first thing you do is you do your rough cut, you assemble your rough story. Things aren't perfect. Transitions are kind of rough. And then you go back through again, give it a second and third pass and do your fine cuts. That's exactly what we're gonna do with this carpet. We're making a rough cut right now to give our eye a little bit of an idea of what things could look like. Beautiful. All right, so hands absolutely covered in Glosso. Starting to lose light, but we made really good progress. And of course you do wanna have a dry rag nearby. I'm filming right now, so I did forget that, but this is sometimes hide your wife, hide your kids material where you might make a little bit of a mess. So I always recommend putting a towel down, having a dry rag to dry your hand off, definitely have a net there, but we're doing okay so far. So we did our rough cut and you can see, I wasn't super duper aggressive, but I still removed a lot of tissue. So the next pass I'm gonna do is gonna really target the front of the glass. So we can get a little bit of a low angle and I'm gonna kind of clean up some of the unevenness. So let's get started with that. I think this time we'll start on this side and we'll go a little bit faster. This is the pace I usually trim at when I'm not filming a video. You know, the more you do this too, the more confident you get with these tools. I remember when I was just kind of starting off in the hobby I was like really, really scared to cut my plants. I think a lot of new hobbyists can probably relate. You're like, what? Chop my plants? That's so scary. I spent all this money to purchase the plants and grow them and they're finally looking good and you're telling me to just cut them down? But results and knowledge are power and are courage. So the more you do this, the more you'll realize that these plants are really, really resilient, especially carpeting plants. You know, they're basically tiny little stem plants. So every time you cut one of these teeny tiny little stems, they come back in, you know, more force than they left with. So when you cut one stem, you know, two to three new ones appear kind of like that Hydra effect. And usually the tissue comes back fresher and more healthy and more green. So that's why we encourage regular trimmings. The other really good thing about trimming is it promotes something called lateral growth, which is the opposite of legginess. And by leggy, I mean, you know, picture that house plant that's not getting a lot of light. It grows what's called the really long internode. That's kind of like that stemmy tall look. And generally we humans have agreed that this isn't the most pleasing thing to the eye. We tend to like denser, low looks, especially with carpets. So by trimming frequently, you promote that lateral growth, which instead of that vertical leggy look, you get more of a horizontal kind of bushy dense long look, which is the whole idea of a carpet, right? It's meant to kind of be the lawn of your aquarium, but you don't always necessarily want it to be that perfect, like homogenous monotonous lawn. A lot of times it's a really good idea to introduce two to three different species and you'll get a really natural look. So I find that the glosso in here kind of has that clover look, almost like something you'd see in a wild meadow. So mixing it with something like an Eleocharis can really give it a natural look. Now I'm going for more of a traditional Iwagumi in this aquarium. So I kind of have my little sections neatly divided, not the most natural look, but I really dig the aesthetic. But if you do want that natural look, when you plant, plant a variety of plants up front with your carpet. And your carpet can extend way deeper than this. It could be the entire tank. It's really up to you. You know, find some inspiration on YouTube or Instagram, find a scaper whose techniques you admire, who takes a holistic approach, acknowledges the science and the art, and try and emulate that. You know, don't spread yourself too thin between different sources of inspiration because like I said earlier, this hobby is not a perfect science. So you want to make sure that you are finding ideas and techniques that you like and that work for you. And then you're sticking to them and not, you know, just mixing and matching and cherry picking ideas. That can be dangerous. All right, so things are looking pretty decent in here. We're going to do one more pass. And that's why I recommend the old spring scissors. So outside of really nice pin sets, which I use for planting and, you know, for doing a little fine work in the aquarium, and outside of my curved scissors, the other tool I cannot live without are spring scissors. And these are manufactured by Ultem Nature Systems. They have them on the Boost Plant website. I'll link all my tools and my plants down below. But these are so good for fine trimming. Fun fact, I even trim my mustache with them. That's how great they are. It's just really easy to kind of get your hand down low and, you know, really do fine trimmings with them. Because instead of having it open and closed like you would with your curved scissors, you just push because of the spring. So it's very, very ergonomic. Let me show you how I use these. All right, so we're getting back in there. And this is where I'm going to just do some, you know, individual cuts, right? So if we use that metaphor of the video edit, I've done my rough cut, I've done my fine cut. Now I'm going through the little sections that stand out to me and don't work. And I'm kind of just moving around a little bit more randomly. So over here, you know, my big curved scissors weren't able to get in. So I'm going to kind of get in here with my spring scissors instead and take care of things. And you see the carpet's working its way a little bit to the back. You know, that's less than ideal for me visually. So I might even uproot a little bit of those guys just to pull them out and maintain some organization in here. And, you know, keeping a well-maintained, well-trimmed aquarium, it's not for everybody, right? Some people like that wild, untamed look, but I like that idea of wabi-sabi, which is perfect chaos, if you will. So I wouldn't say this tank is a great example of wabi-sabi, but having the wild plants in the back that are a little bit disorderly, and then the more trimmed carpet up front, for me, strikes a really interesting balance. And, you know, this is definitely my favorite aquarium in my studio. So I try and take really good care of it. It practically gets no algae. I have such beautiful shrimp in here that breed regularly. I'm gonna be honest, this is probably my dream tank. If I could have seen this tank eight years ago when I first started, I think I would have passed out from happiness. It's just really what got me into the hobby. So super happy to have it balanced and just working out, because it doesn't always work out. So there you go, guys. We've made it through about 90% of our work. You know, if I wasn't filming right now, I'd probably spend another 10 minutes or so just kind of going through, taking a step back, finding little sections that stand out to my eye. And one more key tip is to go a lot lower than you think you have to, because, you know, if you're really shy with your trimmings, you're just gonna have to do it again in a week because you didn't go low enough. So, you know, it's like when you get a haircut, depending on the cut you get, you know, you can tell your barber, hey, you know, go a little bit shorter because I know it's gonna grow back in a week and, you know, I don't wanna be coming in here every couple of weeks. That's kind of how I feel about trimming a carpet is go a little bit shorter than you think you ideally want, because in about a week to 10 days, it's gonna be where you want and then it's gonna quickly fill in again from there. So you don't wanna have to be doing this every week, or maybe you do, depends on your goals. For me, three to four weeks is the sweet spot. So I'm being pretty aggressive with the trimming. So there you go, guys. That's the bulk of the work. I'm 90% there. The next step, of course, is the most cumbersome, not the most fun. You know, you take your net. I would probably start off with a larger one like I got right here. Take your net, scoop everything out, you know, put it into a little container like this. And then what I do is I kind of like let those dry out over a while just so they're no longer viable. You never want trimmings to have any risk of getting into a local waterway. And then after they're dried out, you know, I put them in a plastic garbage bag and they get thrown out. You could also compost them, but like I said earlier, you could recycle them, dry start a new tank, sell them or donate them to a fellow hobbyist. It's really up to you. So that's all the time we have for today's video. Let me know down below in the comment if you found this more longer form video on my channel useful, if you appreciated the tips. And I'd also love to hear from you. What is your favorite aquarium carpet in this beautiful hobby we have? Thank you so much for watching. This has been Logan with Logan Rand Aquascaping and I'll catch you guys and gals next time.