Recently, I've been trying more live plants in my aquariums - anubias (pictured above), Amazon swords, jungle val, corkscrew val, anacharis and more. It helps that I've been getting more into Apistogramma, Geophagus and other non-cichlids that are easier to keep with live plants. The challenge for me though has always been keeping them alive. Anubias are easy enough, but in the past I've even lost plants like swords and java fern, which are supposed to be hardy.
I'm taking a few new steps. One, I've improved my lighting, specifically buying lights for a planted tank. Two, I'm trying dirt. I've been reading up on dirted tanks (dustinsfishtanks.com has some good information on dirted tanks and live plants), but I've been a little hesitant to go all in. Maybe I'm just lazy, or just don't want too big of a mess to cleanup if it doesn't work.
I settled on trying planted pots for some of my root-based plants, such as the Amazon sword pictured above. We'll see how it goes. I used Miracle Gro, which I floated in a bucket so I could use the dirt that sank. I then capped the dirt with some sand. Hopefully, this gives the plants the nutrients they need and gives them a bigger boost than the tablets I was using before. I'm also thinking about a DIY CO2 setup for one tank as an experiment.
As for fake plants, I have plenty of them. They do hold up better with some of my bigger, more aggressive cichlids, but over time, even they break down and fall apart. My experience is a plastic plant will last about 3-5 years before it starts looking like this:
The plastic pedals start falling off on their own and then float on the surface. They become a bit of pain to clean out. Just something to keep in mind if you buy a plastic plant with hopes it will holdup and look pretty forever. If you have fish that won't beat up live plants too much, I think they're worth a try. They are rather inexpensive, often cheaper and more attractive than the plastic plants.
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