Setting up Planted 4ft tank, Substrate selection

[misnoma]

Right.. so I've now got a 4ft tank free (woohoo!) which my flatmate wants to plant to death, and put his fish from his 2ft tank into, which seems like a good idea to me (angels/tetras/pleco basically).

So.. given the idea is to make this tank look primo, and have plants growing etc etc etc.. what should I be using as substrate in the tank?

[Luke*]

There's aquatic clays you can buy (I just use some from Raglan covered with brightwater gravel). You could just use gravel and add substrate fertilisers if you wanted to. Brightwater gravel is the dark stuff which looks nice with tetras. There's laterite which is supposed to be a natural plant substrate, quite expensive though. And there's always sand which is pretty cheap and you can get it in black or baige; the plants find it easy to grow in sand.

Choice is yours

[Lucid]

I basically have a light weight gravel, that is a dark grey and it works really well for plant growth, I have found the key to success for me is for it to be a deep layer of gravel.

However if you are having a pleco in the tank it may be an ongoing task to maintain the plants in the tank. I found tjis out the hard way, whether he was swimming normally or intentially doing it, the plants just wouldn't stay planted for more than a day.

B