We have what I'd consider a lightly planted tank. Several different types of plants that so far, the fish seem to leave alone.

Somebody posted this link on another part of the board...
click
I like these really heavily planted tanks.

If we stick to the plants our fish don't have the taste for (yet) - is it possible to have a heavier planted tank?
If so, how does one go about tank maintenance?
How do we clean the substrate of GF/snail poop and other stuff that falls in?
How do you account for it when figuring out when we get too crowded (with fish/plants)?

Right now we have 4 small fancies (3 faintails and 1 oranda) and a small blue snail in a 65 gallon

I went through a phase with a heavily planted tank in my 46g bowfront. :-D
I used flourite with smaller natural unpainted gravel as my substrate, and had swords, wisteria, cabomba, moneywort, pennywort, anacharis and grass. and of course full spectrum lighting.

My amazon sword did very well, my borneo did not. The wisteria, pennywort and moneywort were sensitive to the salt.

The goldfish ate all my grass! LOL.

SO, what i did is i took glass jars and i pulled ALLLLLL the plants and put them in different types of jars. They are now growing like weeds! So i stuck with swords, wisteria and cabomba. The jars are also helpful in keeping them from pulling up the plants.


Flourite


But if you do not want to do something like that and salt is not an issue, all you really need to do to clean the gravel is lightly disturb the gravel and pull up the debris.

Hope that helped!

I hope you have luck. Some people seem to, and have beautifully planted tanks! My tropicals always left the plants alone, but even if I opened the plant book up and SHOWED it to the goldies, so they could read for themselves that GOLDIES DO NOT LIKE a certain type of plant, they ate it anyway.

Either they ate them or they played swordfight with them or they just shredded them for the fun of it. I never found a single live plant my monsters would let live.....

What do you have that they leave alone? I would love to try it!

They've not touched:
Anacharis
Java Fern
mondo grass (which we had forgotten wasn't a true aquarium plant)
a sword that has leaves the color/pattern of Radican, Marble Queen (but not the shape -it is a sword)
Bananas
Another sword (long stem, wide leaf)
And a plant I have no clue what is.


We have some Bacopa, Water Sprite and Cabomba in the QT tank waiting to try out as well.

If you like heavily planted tanks like the ones in the aquabotanic website you' d better forget attempting to create one and using it as a GF tank

Plant tanks are meant to emphasize the nurturing of the plants themselves, fish are a secondary consideration, usually added as accents to complement the plantings and after they ahd been carefully selected as being non-harmful to the plants (which is why popular choices for these types of tanks are tetras, tiny barbs and rasboras, otocinclus and shrimp)