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Is it Baby's Tears?



Hi all,

OK, so I am always looking at the ground when I am walking looking for plants that may work in my aquariums.  When I am driving I am always turning my head whenever I pass a ditch to see if there is anything interesting down there.  And down here there are a lot of ditches.  My family can't stand to drive with me.  I carry rubber boots in my truck just in case..... 

Well today I was in town (Corpus Christi) on SPID looking for a laser printer.  I came out of Office Max, and right in the parking lot on the grassy median in front of my truck I stepped on this really flat stuff.  I have never seen Baby's Tears but I figured if it grew in Texas, I must have just stepped on it.  It was nice and green and looked nicer than the regular mowed grass next to it.  So I looked left, then right, and then bent over and grabbed a little bunch of it.  I got in the car, and realized that every time I do this the plants are dead by the time I get home.  So I see the plastic spring water bottle from yesterday on the center console.  Its still has about an ounce of water in it.  I unscrewed the cap on put the stems into the bottle one at a time.  I got ready to leave and said to myself "Oh, what the hell...", got out of the truck and grabbed a really big bunch which I proceeded to stuff into the bottle.  Here in Corpus Christi, if you want plants, you can't really go to a store,  its either mail order, or go get them yourself when the opportunity arises.  Besides, I didn't take the grass from the lawn, just the weeds.

Someone last week mentioned using tweezers, which I did to seat the plants in the 75 gallon tank.  I found out that tweezers work really cool, so I learned something today.  Well looking at the Florida invasive plants site, this stuff looks almost like Baby's Tears but not quite.  Leaves are not as rounded.  Looks more like the ton of Bacopa monneri that I have in the tank and which lives in most of the ditches here.

So my two questions are:  

1)   If this is Bacopa monneri, can this stuff really be grown emersed in a lawn?  I've seen it emersed but normally real close to water, like in a ditch.  Surprisingly, the Florida site says it is an emersed plant and only shows photos of it that way.

2)  If it can be used emersed in a lawn, I wonder if it can be used submerged as a lawn at the front of my tank.  It normally grows about a foot-and-a-half out of my tanks.  Could it be the perfect submerged forground planting for a local Padre Island biotope?  It doesn't have to look as good as Glosso or Lillaeopsis, since the fact that it is local makes it more valuable in an authentic biotope.

The samples I just planted are in the front of the tank exposed to a lot of light.  As soon as it roots I will trim it down to see if it will stay flat as a lawn.

Regards,

Steve Pituch




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