How often to fertilize aquarium plants?
by Aquaboy on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 | 5 Comments
How often should I put the liquid iron fertilizer in a 30 gallon tank?
Other articles you might like;
- Is These Pellets Healthy + More Qs-?
- Would This Hurt The Guppy Fry?
- 90g Reef Aquarium Setup Day 5
- Ideas On Fish For Freshwater Community Aquarium?
- Work Experience Melbourne 2011?
If you have fish in the tank, then you should never have to fertilize your tank. Remember, what you put in the tank, stays in the tank. That includes fish food (eaten and not eaten), which would be the fertalizer of your plants. Fertalizer could create an alge bloom which would make your tank ugly and possibly kill off your fish by depriving them of oxygen. That is what happens near farm run off.
Now if it’s a dry aquarium (for snakes, spiders, frogs ect.), again, what you put in the tank stays in the tank and you still will probably won’t need to fertilize the plants.
When plants need iorn, they look healthy except they start to turn yellow. Then you just follow the instructions on the bottle.
It depends on what/how many plants you have, how much lighting you have, what/how many fish you have, ect. When I first started using live plants, the people at http://www.aquariacentral.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=3 were able to help me out a whole bunch. There are some people there who know a whole lot about planted aquariums.
Plants need more nutrients than fish alone can supply. Fish poop does not suppy enough iron and trace elements. There is more I know, but I’m no expert. I know how to make my tank work and my knowledge ends there.
you need more then just liquid iron… iron is trace element for plants… they also need boron, maganese, and a whole host of trace elements…
but they also need the major elements, if you garden you’d know NKP, nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus.
you have to buy testing kits to test your aquarium water. If you have too much nitrogen (nitrate, ammonia) , and phosphorus (phosphate), it’ll kill your fish… Just buy a nitrate, and phosphate test kit.
Make sure to keep nitrates under 10 ppm, and phosphate under 2.0 ppm.
the fish store sells liquid fertilizer you can use..
i know it’s a bit complicated and involved but it’s kinda fun like underwater gardening.
about once a year, providing you dont have fish and its just a planted aquarium, as the fish will get stressed about this chemical. fish food and light is a good fertilizer itself.
i used to keep exotic aquarium plants and i never fertilized them at all