Miniture Sword growth rate question.

Monkey

New Fish
Oct 22, 2002
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#1
Hey hey, I've been all over town looking for some decent ground cover, and I think I may have found it.  The Label on it says "Miniture Sword" and it looks like 1/4 to 1/2 inch lawn grass.  Of course nobody in the store knew anything about it, but th entire top of the "pot" was covered with, so it seems to have grown well enough in captivity.

Does anyone know how long this stuff takes to cover approx 1' x 3' area of mixed Gravel/Sand?
 

arcab4

The Big Fish
The Big Fish
Oct 22, 2002
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#2
i have a bunch in my tank. i planted it into bunches. hoping they would spread..that was about two months ago. so far, they haven't spread. pretty much stayed in bunches. kinda weird. dunno why. but that tank (10gallon) i don't really pay much attention to it. you can find the specs on it under MY TANKS. so maybe someone will have a better experience than me. hope that helps!
 

Monkey

New Fish
Oct 22, 2002
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#3
I've been doing a little searching and here is what I found of value if you are interested.  Mostly newbie info, but someone (like me) is bound to find it interesting if not usefull. :)


http://www.thekrib.com/Plants/Plants/Lilaeopsis.html#0

And

http://www.animalnetwork.com/fish2/aqfm/1997/aug/aquatic/default.asp

And an overall plant growing review for us newbies.

http://marge.phys.washington.edu/~erik/plants.txt

Hasta's
Chris
 

Oct 22, 2002
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#5
I am new here, but wanted to reply to this..

I had some microsword (I think probably the same thing...looked like lawn grass) in my first planted tank. Like you I thought it would be a great ground cover.  The problem was, It didn't spread well at all. Now it might have been user error, as it was my first planted tank, (a ten gallon, diy CO2, kitty litter substrate with fern spikes and 4 watts per gallon of light) but this is what happened. I only had one pot of the microsword, so when I planted it I broke it up into smaller pieces. It did send out runners, but there was a lot of space between the shoots. so I had about 5 "lines" of grass on the bottom of my tank. They also didn't stay down very well, and everytime I would vacuum the surface of the sand covering the kitty litter, even moving the vacuum tube above them would suck them out of the substrate.

Anyway, just my experience. I think maybe your best bet would be to buy three or four pots of this, and plug them whole into the substrate. THen maybe they would spread more thickly. Kind of like plugs for your lawn, you know what I mean?

Hope that helps,

Jan
 

SegaDojo

Large Fish
Oct 22, 2002
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#6
yes... lilaeopsis is a very slow growing plant.. but if you've got lots of it to begin with, then it shouldn't take long to cover up all the empty patches.

Because it is a slow growing plant, it is very susceptible to algae growth.  Be sure to have some algae eaters (like otocincluses and SAEs) to prevent this.