Okay, so there you are, sitting on your couch staring at your beautiful discus tank. You've just blown a fortune on this puppy and your 2 discus were $100....on sale! The wife says, "Honey, here's ten bucks, please run to the market and get some milk, bagels, and cream cheese. Now you run over to the market, and do your honey-do. As your driving home you see the big red sign to your petstore. Your having a party this weekend and all you can think about is how you want to impress your guests with your tank. Man, I need to use live plants in my tank to make it look real authentic. South American-like....you know what I mean..... Next thing you know, your car is in front of the petstore and you better have a credit card on you to buy these plants. You end up buying some cabomba, anacharis, and some beautiful amazon swords. (These are the common types of plants available anywhere.) and you just blew $50 bucks. You run to your car, fly home in hopes that the wife isn't gonna be mad over the warm milk in the back seat. You finally get home, put everthing in the fridge and begin your evening of aquatic landscaping.
You rip open the bag-o-plants and away you go. Swords in the back, cabomba in the middle, and some anacharis in the foreground. Whew! Now that looks killer! The party that weekend is great, your friends love your tank, everythings cool......Now, 5 days later your amazons that were beautiful and green are now yellowing and turning brown on the edges, your cabomba and anacharis has been eaten or is just plain disinigrating. What the heck is going on here? So you jump back in your car, go back to the petstore and talk to one of the employees in the fish department. "Oh, you need to use some fertilizer", they say. (Oh that's why every thing is dying, I didn't fertilize.....) So you cruise back home.......read the instructions on the package of fertilizer, dump 'em in......Now it's 2 weeks later, one of your discus is belly up, your Amazons look like brown skeletons of what was once a beautiful leafy plant, your cabomba is floating in peices on top of the water and clogging your filter, and God only knows where your anacharis is.....This live plant thing sucks, and I'm never going to use live plants again you say. I'm just going to get them damn plastic ones. Period!
This is my true experience.
So why'd my plants die? There's dozens of reasons why....Wrong plants is a good start. Hey man, these plants didn't belong in a high temp tank with acidic conditions. No Duh! Well, you know I didn't know that before but it took me many years of expermentation and observation, in addition to book reading to get it right. Now I don't use Co2 injection, but that certainly can help. Fluval peat granules.....I can't stop praising the stuff!
Anyways, the following is a list of plants that I consider compatible with Discus conditions. Enjoy!