# DIY Floating Plant Corral



## iointerrupt (Feb 16, 2007)

I recently bit the bullet and _purposely_ introduced duckweed to a 10gal tank of mine in an effort to reduce the lighting and be a fast grower. And sure enough in a week the top of the tank was entirely covered. This made putting ones arm in the tank for maintenance rather unpleasant to say the least.

So after being inspired by a similar design I saw on an Oliver Knott tank (for which I can no longer find the picture), I set out to make a floating plant corral.

The design is basically a circle of airline tubing siliconed together, and then some mesh netting sown around it:





Although the picture shows a 4" net, I ended up using the netting from an 8" net instead. The netting is to keep anything from pulling the duckweed down and under the tubing. It also means you can lift the entire corral, plants and all, right out of the tank.

A bent paperclip is put in both open ends of the tubing to keep them from separating while the silicone dries:



After being placed in the tank and "seeded" with a dozen duckweed leaves, it grew to look like this in about two weeks:







As you can see in the last picture, the tubing ended up floating slightly _below_ the water. I had figured this would render the corral useless, but it is still good enough that there has only been one or two "escapees" from it. Even with big waves from my arms in the tank for pruning, the duckweed still stays put.

One interesting side effect is that it appears to have slowed the growth rate of the duckweed (defeating the purpose of having duckweed perhaps?).

Overall it works great though, if you want to keep duckweed but not be conquered by it, this seems like an easy way to do it.


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## Jubs (Mar 24, 2006)

Very cool idea thanks for sharing!


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