What aquarium plants are easy to grow?

To my personal experience, hydrilla verticillata and duck weed are great plants that spread very quickly in your aquarium with reasonable light.

I have tried other types of plants but was never successful. I have always tried amazon sword but failed at all attempts. Whenever I got myself an amazon sword, it would get covered by algae and die.

Sometimes plants may compete with other varieties by releasing chemicals in the water which inhibit the growth of their competition.

If the water is too rich in nutrients, especially ammonia, although plants utilize ammonia as food, they will not grow if there's too much of it.

You need to balance things out with water changes. If you are dealing with too many fish and do not find much time to do water changes, you can use aggressive plants like duck weed or hydrilla. In fact, if you got fish that do not consume duck weed, then it would be a better choice to hydrilla. Even though hydrilla is an aggressive plant, I have witnessed it losing the battle against algae at times. Duck weed floats at the top. It's leaves float on the surface of water, so algae cannot cover that. Duck weed divides quickly and will soon cover your entire aquarium and deprive algae of light and nutrition.




So from personal experience, I would say duck weed and hydrilla are best for good water quality.

If you are keeping an aquarium for show, then these are not the plants for you. They are not pretty looking plants. If you are trying to keep some pretty looking plants in your aquarium, try out these few steps:

• Start your aquarium with the plant of your choice. Not fish.
• Taking into account, the number of fish you are going to stock in there, get the right amount of that plant.
• Due to competitive nature of plants, as a beginner, stick with just one variety of plant. Don't mix.
• Start with small amount of fish.
• Fish should not disturb the plants.
• Plant mass should be roughly 15 to 20 times the fish mass, so that it can handle the bio load. The plant should dominate the tank.
• Invest in good lighting. Go for special grow led lights.
• Light should be bright enough to reach your plants.
• If one type of light don't work after a month, get another type.
• Metal halide lighting is expensive, give heat but is known to be best.
• Turn on light for at least 8 hours daily.
• Best and cheapest option would be to place tank near window where there is natural light. Gives best results.
• Provide good type of substrate soil for your plants. Many aquariums sell that.

If you got convict cichlids, you might need to put some heavy stones to secure the plants. These fish mostly destroy everything. Sometimes they may leave the plants alone. Depends on their personality and mindset. ;)

Hope all this info helps.

The Convict Cichlid (Kindle Edition Ebook)