Plant care

Here’s how to maintain your aquarium plants

If you DON’T care for your plants they will become too long, sprawl everywhere but where they should be or grow badly. Perfect plant care needs a bit of attention. They are amongst your most important aquarium dwellers after all!

Gardening

You can indeed regard your aquarium as a garden: except for the watering of the plants, many activities are quite similar. Gardening in the aquarium means pruning plants, thinning and removing dead leaves.

Trimming plants

Perhaps some of your plants are growing too high, even though they are not intended as background plants. You can easily trim these plants with scissors (e.g. JBL PROSCAPE TOOLS S STRAIGHT ). Protruding leaves, as with wild celery, need to be cut off at the base rather than simply cutting away the long leaves.

Thinning out:

Aquarium plants, like all plants, reach towards the light. Stem plants grow upwards and their lower part often loses their leaves, leaving the stem looking bare. Here you can trim off the upper part, remove the lower leafless part and replant the upper part. If plants are too close together, this effect also occurs.

Removing dead leaves:

If you snorkel in a tropical body of water, you will hardly see the bottom for all the fallen leaves. In the aquarium, however, unlike in nature, we have an extremely small water volume and the decomposition process of a single leaf releases so many nutrients into the aquarium water that algae can develop which will use these released nutrients as food. Therefore, it is ABSOLUTELY recommended that you cut dying or dead plant leaves off the healthy plant using scissors and then remove them from the water!

Cardinal neons in Colombia

If you’d like leaves in your aquarium, we recommend dried leaves from the sea almond tree (Catappa). These leaves do decay over time, but they release a lot of useful ingredients into the aquarium water ( JBL Catappa XL and JBL Nano-Catappa ). Moreover, they are of tropical origin and thus much more natural than oak or other European leaves.

Catappa tree

Plant care

What care do your plants need in the aquarium?
Fertilising

Since your aquarium plants need more than water and love, treat them to some minerals and trace elements. The substances available in the water are not sufficient for vigorous and healthy plant growth.

Fertilising your aquarium plants involves three factors:

1.  CO2 fertilisation: The staple food of all plants is carbon dioxide (CO2 gas), which can be added with the help of a CO2 fertiliser system (JBL PROFLORA CO2 system).

2.  Liquid fertilisation: With the help of liquid fertiliser ( JBL PROFLORA Ferropol ) you can add all your weekly essential minerals to the aquarium water and your aquarium plants will then absorb the minerals. For sensitive and demanding plants, the basic fertiliser JBL PROFLORA FERROPOL can be supplemented with a daily fertiliser ( JBL PROFLORA Ferropol 24 ).

3.  Root fertilisation: Almost all aquatic plants also absorb nutrients through their roots. JBL PROFLORA Ferropol Root was developed for this purpose. Insert a fertiliser tablet in the root area of the plant(s) every month. Half-yearly supplementation with clay minerals in ball form is highly recommended ( JBL PROFLORA 7 Balls ).

How do I get my plants to flourish in the aquarium?

All the factors needed for proper plant growth: light, LEDs, tubes, fertilisation, fertilisation amount, fertilisation check, interaction with water conditioners, chelated iron. Watch an experiment about checking the iron in the fertiliser. How to insert plants properly. How does fertilising in aquascaping aquariums differ from in normal aquariums? When is an NPK fertiliser useful?

Fertilising

Why do aquarium plants need to be fertilised?
Technical issues

If your plants are properly cared for and fertilised, you still only require the right light and a basic supply of their main nutrient CO2. For this purpose the JBL SOLAR light system and a selection of CO2 fertiliser systems are available for you.

The staple food of your aquarium plants: carbon dioxide (CO2)

For us humans, carbohydrates, fats and proteins form the basic building blocks of our diet. In all plants, CO2 corresponds to these elements and is therefore essential for plant growth. In photosynthesis, the plants can then process the CO2 with water under the influence of light energy into sugar (their food). This process releases oxygen, which all animal organisms need to breathe. In the aquarium water, a little CO2 is always present due to a concentration balance with the CO2 in our air. However, this low CO2 content is not sufficient for vigorous growth, for heavily planted aquariums and for more demanding plant species. With the help of a CO2 fertiliser system, you can add enough CO2 to the water to keep your plants perfectly supplied with their basic food.

Why do aquarium plants need a CO2 system?

If your aquarium plants aren’t growing perfectly, there must be a deficiency somewhere. Very often they lack their main nutrient CO2 (carbon dioxide). In this video we explain why plants need CO2 in the first place, why aquarium plants have different requirements and how to connect a JBL CO2 system.

CO2

Why is CO2 so important for plant care? What benefits does CO2 fertilisation provide?

Lighting

How do you light your aquarium properly? Which aquarium lighting is best?

A word about cookies before we continue

The JBL Homepage also uses several types of cookies to provide you with full functionality and many services: We require technical and functional cookies to ensure that everything works when you visit this website. We also use cookies for marketing purposes. This ensures that we recognise you when you visit our extensive site again, that we can measure the success of our campaigns and that the personalisation cookies allow us to address you individually and directly, adapted to your needs - even outside our website. You can determine at any time - even at a later date - which cookies you allow and which you do not allow (more on this under "Change settings").

The JBL website uses several types of cookies to provide you with full functionality and many services: Technical and functional cookies are absolutely necessary so that everything works when you visit this website. In addition, we use cookies for marketing purposes. You can determine at any time - even at a later date - which cookies you allow and which you do not (more on this under "Change settings").

Our data protection declaration tells you how we process personal data and what purposes we use the data processing for. tells you how we process personal data and what purposes we use the data processing for. Please confirm the use of all cookies by clicking "Accept" - and you're on your way.

Are you over 16 years old? Then confirm the use of all cookies with "Noticed" and you are ready to go.

Choose your cookie settings

Technical and functional cookies, so that everything works when you visit our website.
Marketing cookies, so that we recognize you on our pages and can measure the success of our campaigns.

PUSH messages from JBL

What are PUSH messages? As part of the W3C standard, web notifications define an API for end-user notifications that are sent to the user's desktop and/or mobile devices via the browser. Notifications appear on the end devices as they are familiar to the end user from apps installed on the device (e.g. emails). Notifications appear on the end user’s device, just like an app (e.g. for emails) installed on the device.

These notifications enable a website operator to contact its users whenever they have a browser open - it doesn’t matter whether the user is currently visiting the website or not.

To be able to send web push notifications, all you need is a website with a web push code installed. This allows brands without apps to take advantage of many of the benefits of push notifications (personalised real-time communications at just the right moment).

Web notifications are part of the W3C standard and define an API for end user notifications. A notification makes it possible to inform the user about an event, such as a new blog post, outside the context of a website.

JBL GmbH & Co. KG provides this service free of charge, and it is easy to activate or deactivate.