New Tropica plants

I got really lucky a few weeks ago. While traveling on business I received an email from a gent that had seen some of my threads over at www.plantedtank.net. Seems he works for Tropica, and wanted to send me some plants to try. Woohoo! Tropica does not export to the USA, so I was thrilled! Just in case you are not aware, Tropica - a Danish company - is to my knowledge, the world’s premier aquatic plant supplier. Visit them at www.tropica.com and you’ll see.

In fact, if you check my “Links” tab, you’ll see that I count their web site as one of my most valuable references. You should to.

Anyway, I told this gent that the average plant may have a tough time in the warm water of my discus tank. And to my delight he sent three plants, two of which look like the may do very well. He sent Staurogyne sp., a foreground suitable plant from warm Amazonian waters. It looks great already.

He also sent Myriophyllum mezianum. It’s an interesting looking stem plant from Madagascar. But I’ve had bad luck with other Myriophyllum in my warm, very soft water. So I’m trying not to get my hopes up on this one. Both of the plants are featured on the Tropica web site, and I’ve never seen either in the states.

The final plant in the shipment was Lindernia roundifolia ‘variegated’. I can’t find much on this plant. Looks a lot like ‘baby’s tears’, or Hemianthus callitrichoides, commonly called ‘HC’ or ‘cuba’. I only got a few cut stems of that. These are not doing as well. Getting a lot of stem melt. But that could be due to the low Potassium in my tank.

Before I planted any of these plants, I took half of them and rooted them in a tank of very wet ADA aquasoil, in a small covered aquarium, and top a grow light over them. They all appear to be in their emersed form, and are already putting out new buds in this warm, humid simulation on natural emersed conditions.

The rest I put into shallow plastic dishes of ADA aquasoil, then covered the aqauasoil with sand to keep the aquasoil from getting all over the sand in the tank, and put them in the tank under direct light. Obviously this is not a permanent arrangement, but one that will let me try our the plants. The emersed set of plants are both my insurance of something going wrong in the thank, and hopefully a nursery for more plants. All of these should be slow growers, so this test will likely take a bit of time.

Unfortunately my PC died on me this week, so my ability to post pictures is really limited. I’m composing this entire post on my iPhone, which is a real PITA. But I’m grateful that I have an alternative until I get a new PC up and running. I’m going to try and post pics with the little iPhone camera. They’ll look like crap, to be sure. But it’s the best I can do at the moment.

I’m thrilled and grateful for the chance to try out these plants. Wish me luck!