Pond Boss Forums AQUATIC VEGETATION Balance of plants in the environment Dwarf Sagittaria.

Anyone have experience with aquatic plants?

Wondering two things about dwarf sagittaria.

1) how dose day light hours effect the growth?

2) how dose light intensity effect the growth, light colour a side?

With tomatoes I can trick them into flowering by changing the day light hours to 12 hours. This changes the hormones in the plant triggering it to flower. With running them on 18 hours they will grow tall with out flowers. We have found with most garden plants that if you back their day light hours off on the seedlings to 10 hours they will flower early and produce more vegetables. Peppers are the best at this. If I put the seedlings on 10 hour photo period they will get very thick in the stock and flower very very hard late summer and yield twice the number of peppers on the year.

In our grow bed for the Sag we have lots of good nutrients. We have high light so high we are seeing alga on the gravel in under 7 days. The only limiting factor will be C02. We have circulation of the water when the light is on with the hopes to have as much C02 the air can provide.

How I hope to control the Sag is to give it the light it needs to spread out shoots. My guess if no one has experience with this and Sag is 18 hours would be the best fit for this. I have heard that Sag can flower so I suspect 8-10 hours is not good for spreading out the plants.

Other thought is that currently when planting the plants we have a very very big root mass on each plant. That after the plants have taken root for a month I was thinking of trimming off the leaves to 5-6". With the thought that the plant will not want to abort the root mass and feed the top growth. With only one place to go it should shoot runners and spread out or grow the tops longer. I expect if the light intensity is high enough they will stay short and spread out.

Plant experts please chime in when you can.

Cheers Don.