Anyone have success with plants with just sand, light and adding some liquid fertiliser?

I have a discus tank that just has aquarium river sand in. I have lights on

I've added giant vallis, swords, java fern, and some harder leaved plants that grow well on wood whos name escapes me

I add aquadip plant food but my plants so far dont seem to be doing at all well. I have only been adding plant food for about 8 weeks and I have got a lotus lily that after a couple of years is throwing up lilys to the surface but the other plants dont look any different

Does it take longer to see a change, how long do you leave your lights on if you want to grow plants in a tank and is it possible to have success without a substrate that contains plant growing goodness?

Giant Vallis is more of a cool water plant and doesn't do well in aquariums. Narrow and corkscrew (twisted) Vallis do better in tropical aquariums.

Java fern is a relatively slow growing plant and so are Echinodorus (sword plants). Faster growing plants include things like Ambulia, Hygrophila polysperma and Elodia.

I grew plants in gravel with a liquid plant fertiliser (Sera Florena) and had good success. I had 3-4 inches of gravel on top of an undergravel filter. I gravel cleaned around the plants each week but left a few inches of undisturbed gravel around each plant. I added the fertiliser each week after a 75% water change. I had fluorescent lights above the tanks and the lights were on for around 15 hours a day.

You don't need special substrates to grow plants and if you use an aquarium plant substrate with slow growing plants like Java Fern, you can have algae problems because the nutrients don't get used up.

The following link has basic information on growing aquarium plants.

Plain sand with liquid fertilizer is just fine it's all I use! No CO2 either, simply play sand and liquid fertilizer dosed according to plant needs and nitrate levels. Aim to keep nitrates between 5-10ppm range if possible, no higher than 20ppm. But if I don't dose fertilizer, I don't have nitrates at all and the plants don't like that lol

So while getting used to what you need, I definitely recommend testing the first while to see if you need more or less fertilizer, regardless of what it says on the bottle.






Oh, I have giant vals, they grow massive, you will have to trim them short in nearly every aquarium under 100 gallons for sure or they will shade everything else out. They don't put out as much runners as other vallisneria I find, but they're very robust plants in my experience.

I do really well with Vallisneria americana. I don't have any tanks above 25c.

The plant grows wild around here, but if it's collected after mid July, as the sunlight begins to shorten, it dies off. Anytime around the summer solstice, or before it, and it's still thriving 6 years on. I use playground sand, or pool filter sand for a larger grain, and give it root tabs every few years, when I remember to.

I use no liquid ferts, but probably should. My limited (but evolving) choice of plants seems to be doing very well.

Nearly all my tanks have been sand and/or gravel substrate, and tons of the plants have done fine even when I was very forgetful about adding root tabs or liquid ferts! Even the ones that appreciate a root tab (and some cheaper, but name brand root tabs, like Tetra or API brand ones, are still good! Just avoid any random, non-name root tabs since they can release too much of any random thing that's been added into the water column. Had that with cheap, non-name brand root tabs from amazon once, as did someone else here recently). But for ones that appreciate a root feed, like crypts, swords, vallis... they can provide a really get good "stick a tab or 1/2 a tab under their roots and forget for the next six months" boost!

Will be adding some photos to my own threads later, because today I snapped some photos of the plants that have survived my neglecting them with zero ferts, root tabs and not much light either over the last two years! One is a massive crypt, an offshoot of ones that I inherited from my dad's tank, were cut down to nothing but roots at one point because of persistant black algae but grew back from nothing but roots, and I've had various plants from them since then. About two years ago I scooped this one crypt plant into a cup as I tore down the main tank and didn't want to disturb the roots of my established plants too much. It's been a shady corner of my darkest, oldest tank now with no extra ferts in just a cup of plain sand, cheap and later malfunctioning Nicew light bar, but the crypt looks amazing, is bursting out of the cup, and will easily split into several small plants once I unpot, split and replant it.

Even if it does a crypt melt, which this one hasn't usually, I know it'll be back! Crypts are brilliant like that, they're greedy root feeders and can put out some amazing root systems and fast growth if given the chance, but also super forgiving in lower light, less ferts, and will just keep chugging away, and coming back even if you wind up having to cut them back to nothing but roots.

My crinum had root tabs when I first got it, but it's been in the same boat as the crypt for the last two years, in it's own cup of no ferts added sand, looks wonderful and I just measured the longest leaf at 42 cms/3.5 FEET!
I'll upload the photos of those two I just took in a min

Have three types of java fern that are also still doing well, the normal, the narrow leaf, and the twisty windlov types, all coping just stuck into spots of hardscape or left to float and do their thing, producing baby plants and plugging away.


This tank hasn't had ferts added yet, Argos play sand, Nicrew lightbar, nothing fancy, nothing but pleco poop, but in two weeks the plants went from this:


to this: