Top 5 Tips for Creating a Beautiful and Successful Planted Aquarium

Hi everyone, welcome to this new video where we're going to go through our five top tips for creating a beautiful and successful planted aquarium. So number one is inspiration. So before we actually start aquascaping, it's important to come up with your inspiration. You know, what kind of story do you want to tell with your aquascape? And you can get inspiration from several places. With aquascaping, we often create these beautiful nature aquariums. A classic way to get inspiration is to spend time in nature. You can go for a walk in the woods, in the forest, or by the coastline, by the sea, depending on if you want to create a wood-based layout or a rock-based layout. There's just infinite amounts of inspiration out there from nature itself. You can also get inspiration from other aquascapers. For instance, we've had Takayuki Fukada here with us the last couple of days, and he is a world-class aquascaper, and just him and his work has provided me personally with lots of inspiration. You can get inspiration from the internet, of course. Don't forget, you can go on the Tropica website or download the Tropica app for lots of inspirational layouts, which will give you a full rundown of each aquascape and what plants are used and how they're maintained, etc. So there really is an abundance of inspiration out there. Me personally, I'm getting my inspiration from the nature, from the forests, and that's why we're using wood today, got a huge selection of plants here to use. Excited to take you on the journey and go through the other four steps, of course, of how to create a beautiful and successful planted aquarium. So our second top tip for ensuring we can create the most beautiful planted aquarium possible is to make sure we have the right kit, so the right equipment. In our case, we've got a beautiful rimless, low-iron aquarium here. We've got some powerful external filtration here, CO2 injection kit here to give the plants the best chance possible of success. And then we have some powerful lighting as well. We'll be using a nutrient-rich soil substrate and liquid fertilizers, and all these things together will ensure we optimize plant growth, thus will help to create a successful aquarium. Next step is to talk about our number three top tip. Can you guess what it is? Okay, for those that guessed hardscape, well done. The hardscape, or the aquarium decor, is the backbone of any successful planted aquarium or aquascape. It's really responsible for creating that high impact, and you can create some absolutely beautiful aquascapes almost purely by using really powerful hardscape. Got some beautiful pieces of wood here, which we'll install later. And yeah, we can spend a lot of time choosing the appropriate hardscape. Make sure it's aquarium safe, of course. Ideally, we'd like to get it pre-soaked so it actually sinks in the water when you fill up your aquarium. These might float, so what we're going to do is actually glue them in position. Okay, so that's our beautiful hardscape installed. In this case, we're using two pieces of driftwood. There's no need for rocks in here. I think the wood's powerful enough on its own. We have actually glued it together and to the glass using cotton wool and superglue, like a liquid-type superglue. And this is a common technique with aquascaping if you definitely don't want your wood or other pieces of hardscape to move around, especially when you're filling with water. We do not want the wood to float, of course. And when we're maintaining the aquarium, we don't want to topple anything over. It is, as you can see, filling up the aquarium quite considerably, so this will make maintenance a little bit tricky. You might need to invest in a special tool like a thin scraper or a small toothbrush. But in my mind, it's really important to have a very impactful hardscape. This, like I said earlier, gives you the backbone of the aquascape, and it's a really, really great tip in order to create a beautiful aquascape. So we'll move on to our fourth tip now, which is choosing the right plants. Okay, tip number four, choosing the right plants. Lots of considerations here. The first one is to ensure that your equipment that you're running is appropriate for the type of plants that you want to keep. So Tropica have three categories of plants, easy, medium, and advanced. Here we have actually a selection of all three. And if you, for instance, want to grow advanced plants, then you can check out our top five advanced plants video, which I'll leave a link to in the description. You need to have good levels of lighting, which we have, CO2 injection, which we have, good substrate, which we have, and also good amounts of liquid fertilizers. So bear this in mind if you want to grow advanced plants. If you want to grow easy plants, you don't actually need CO2 injection, but it will absolutely benefit all aquarium plants. So really do consider using CO2 injection if you can. Medium category is like in between easy and advanced. Definitely will benefit from CO2 injection and higher levels of lighting. So the plants we've got today, we've got a beautiful selection. Mostly the Tropica 1-2 Grow, which are grown in our Danish laboratories, guaranteed to be free from algae, snails, pesticides, and disease. They're already growing in a liquid or a gel, so actually ready to grow straight away in your aquarium. They've already adapted to underwater growth. So these represent great value for money. You actually get a lot of quantity of plants compared to a regular pot as well. They're just a lot smaller. So we've got a nice selection here. We've got Marsilea hirsuta, Eleocharis acicularis mini, Helanthium tenellum green, and these are going to be almost mixed up, not randomly, but certainly blended to give us a more natural texture. And in the mid-ground on the right here, we've got the Hydrocotyle verticolata. This reminds me of mushrooms. It has a very kind of vertical kind of stem and then a disc growing from the top. Beautiful plants. And then to the left, mid-ground, we've got the Junkus repens, which is a very interesting stem plant. It kind of grows quite chaotically and gives us another enhanced sense of nature. And then finally, in the background, we have some stem plants, and then we're going to mix up Rotala hetera and also the Rotala rotundifolia green. Finally, and the last plant that I usually add to the aquarium are the epiphyte plants. These are plants that attach to our wood. In this case, we've got the beautiful Bicosaurum terrapis trident and also the Hygrophila pinnatifida, which can also be used as a stem plant, but I actually really love to see it used as an epiphyte plant. And under good levels of lighting, it will turn a beautiful red color. So it's going to be a really beautiful, healthy, vibrant aquascape, and I can't wait to get the plants prepared and planted. Okay, as you can see, we've installed our soil. This provides a host of nutrients for the plant roots. We'll also be adding a liquid fertilizer further down the line as well to ensure those plants are well-fed at all times. We've prepared the plants. As I said before, beautiful selection of foreground, mid-ground, background, and epiphytic plants as well. And now we'll plant them, nice and simply. Okay, there's the aquarium filled. Now we're ready for revealing our last and arguably most important tip for keeping a beautiful planted aquarium. We need to maintain it, and maintenance is especially important in the early stages of setting up an aquarium. You can use our Tropica app to help you, so make sure you download that. That's now available on iOS and Android devices, free to use. Great host of information on there, including inspirational layouts, a complete plant database, and just a really wonderful resource for planted aquarium hobbyists. But maintenance, yes, very important. We need to be doing at least weekly water changes for the first few weeks. After that, you can probably go to once a week, and you want to be changing at least 10 to 25%, but in a higher energy aquarium with CO2 injection and strong lighting, you probably want to change more water. We want to be adding liquid fertilizers regularly to make sure the plants are well-fed. And we need to, of course, keep the aquarium glass clean, keep the filter clean, filter hoses clean. We do have a comprehensive maintenance video. There's a few of them now on our channel, so make sure you check those out as well for more details. Thank you so much for watching. Hope you've enjoyed it. For a chance to have your own content featured on Tropica's social media channels, use the hashtag MadeWithTropica. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Tropica Aquarium Plants. And please like this video if you have liked it and share it. Take care, and I'll see you on the next one.