I set up a soil based planted tank a month or so ago, and when I planted it I used the Amazon Sword that was in the tank before the over haul of the tank. The Sword was already large, but not overly so, well since then it's become huge, it puts out one or two new leaves per week. It's now so big it's shading a good 70% of the tank and my plants that like higher light are beginning to suffer. For instance I tried planting dwarf hair grass and even got a Fluval Planted light to try and help it along, all but a few blades of the hair grass have died. My question is how many leaves can I cut off the sword before too many are cut and the plant goes into shock?
These pictures were taken today, before a water change. I'd just cut around 6 of the old leaves off of it, 2 were yellow, and the other 4 were starting to yellow. The reason the leaves are drooping over is they are against the side glass.
From what I just read, on a planted tank message board, it looks like I can prune as many leaves off the sword as I need to. Also from what I just read, it looks like I'll probably end up getting rid of the sword since it's never going to be a good fit for either my 10 or 20 gal tanks. For anyone wondering, I've no idea what type of sword it is, it's the one that they sell at PetSmart in the plastic tubes.
Time to trim the sword, and go look for more appropriate plants. The sword killed 3 out of the 4 new plants I got last month by keeping the tank so shaded... a good $40 down the drain!
As a side note you really need a good plant substrate and co2 for hairgrass to thrive. It's hard to tell from the picture but it looks like you have a sand bottom.
You're partly right about it being sand but it's a sand cap. The tank is supposed to be a Natural Planted Tank and under the sand is a 2 inch layer of soil, that soil is why the sword decided to get real happy and grow really large LOL. While the hairgrass might not have reached it's full potential since I don't do CO2 injections it shouldn't have died like it did if it had been getting adequate light.
If the new batch I have coming in a few days dies, despite the sword being gone, a planted light being on the tank, and it getting natural light from the window I'll just give up on it. It might be the PH of the water and there's not much I can do about that.
My local fish place wont accept sword pups for a while, I gave them over 50 plants like the ones in the image, I have 2 Swords and on average each one sends out 2 runners every month or so with up to 15 plants on them.
In my "Let's Make Every Mistake Possible" category, I decided to up root the Amazon Sword.
For those reading, if you have a natural planted tank do NOT pull up a giant Amazon Sword. Just don't do it. I tried to find instructions on how to correctly uproot one without creating a mess, but did not find any. I figured that I'd just gently and slowly pull it up and it should be O.K.. Mistake, HUGE mistake. It's been around 10 minutes and my tank still resembles a murky lake, my sand cap is coated with black soil so I'm going to have to redo it to the tune of $13 dollars in new sand, and at least 30 min of cleaning the sand... I'm honestly not sure how I'm going to clean up the mess.
If I had to do it again I'd just pull up the sword enough to get to the roots then cut it off and leave the roots to slowly decompose.
So y'all can see what I managed to do, here's a picture. Yep, I don't mess up halfway, oh no, I go all out!
Oof, I did the same thing a couple of weeks ago. Decided my Sword was getting too squished in the corner so I moved it to the middle of the tank- I did not expect how big its root system would be! Luckily I have just sand, not dirt underneath, so it didn't take too much work to get everything resettled.
Mine would have been a lot worse if it had been in the tank longer. It's only been in that spot for around a month, and the roots had already started to spread.
I'm going to have to do at least a 50% water change and vacuum up as much of the mess as I can. Then put some new medium in the filter and let it run till bedtime, clean out the filter medium, run it over night, then put the original medium with the BB back in.
I just did a 50% water change and while it looks a bit better, there's still dirt all over the sand in the back of the tank. It took the 50% water change just to get most of the dirt off the sand in the front of the tank. I think I'll just cover the rest of the dirt with sand, the sand should be delivered on Friday. The water is still very cloudy. I have the filter back on and I put in new filter sponge to try and filter out the sediment, I'll rinse it out every few hours so that the filter hopefully doesn't get clogged with sediment. I have the old filter medium sitting in the tank so that the BB does not die from.
The new plants are planted, and I hope that I don't lose too many of them, and that they'll fill in fast, the top of the water column is nearly bare with the sword gone. I've yet to plant the dwarf hairgrass, I hate planting it and I needed a break! I'm thinking about waiting till I get the new sand in the tank to plant it since I think it would be a pain to put the sand in around newly planted hair grass.
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