# What are good plant maintance tools?



## AquaNeko (Jul 26, 2009)

Was checking out BigAl's in thier plant maintance are and saw some tong/cutter combos and wondering what's good, bad, what to look for? I was thinking longer tong/cutters would be handy for larger tanks.


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## ksimdjembe (Nov 11, 2006)

I guess it depends on how serious into plants you want to get.
I personally am not a high tech plant guy, but my tanks are full of plants. low to mid light and slow growers for the most part. 
Best tools: little plant anchors and my hands. I dont think that most need a real techy bunch of tweezers if you are just keeping regular java fern, crypts, vallis plants and gygro species. Just my $0.02


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## conix67 (Jul 27, 2008)

The best tool for your aquairum is your hand! Of course if you don't have a hand you're out of luck 

I was tempted to purchase some planting tools from LFS or online, but I ended up without them. Bare hands are the best since you can feel things around it, and a lot of things you have to do without looking.. 

I use a small cheap scissors for cutting..


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## AquaNeko (Jul 26, 2009)

I was thinking of those extended reach tong/cutters when you reach over 20gal tanks so you're not going to get wet all the time should you not want to get wet then. I may just go with Conix67's suggestion and get a pair of longer stainless scissors.


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## conix67 (Jul 27, 2008)

AquaNeko said:


> I was thinking of those extended reach tong/cutters when you reach over 20gal tanks so you're not going to get wet all the time should you not want to get wet then. I may just go with Conix67's suggestion and get a pair of longer stainless scissors.


I don't think you're going to get your hands wet very frequently, unless you're building high tech planted tanks with CO2 and fast growing species.

I do trimming once every few months. Until things settle down you might tinker with it more often, but once you're satisfied, you'll just let it be and trim the excess only when they grow too large.


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