new to dirt and planted tanks

so i just started fish keeping about a month ago and i have 4 x ray or priscilla tetras in a 10 gallon tank. anyways i always hear talk about how good dirt is and how well it grows plants as opposed to flourite and eco complete and regular gravel but i havent heard any straight forward answer or reasons behond it all. i was just wondering the pros and cons of using dirt... i also set up a small experiment with a gold ribbon plant i just got at petco and i planted it in the bottom of a plastic waterbottle i cut the bottom off of and capped it off with gravel to see root growth and how good dirt is. let me know what you think!

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Permalink Reply by Daniel89 on October 18, 2011 at 10:04pm

Dirt is a very good route to go if u wanna grow plants in an aquarium. It provides plenty of nutrients for good plant growth. It's basically the natural way to go, it's what plants grow in the wild. The only con is when u wanna move a plant makes a bit of a mess, just make sure u have ur gravel vac handy. Anyway just go with dirt u won't be sorry

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Permalink Reply by Connor on October 19, 2011 at 4:29pm

thanks man, it was real helpful

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Permalink Reply by Hmoobthor on October 19, 2011 at 3:32pm

it's a cheap alternative form eco comeplete and fluorite

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Permalink Reply by Danny1107 on October 20, 2011 at 9:31am

Dirt is cheap and it helps the plants, its not hard to do, all you need to do is keep ontop of the BIG water changes for the first 3-5 days. I dirted my tank about 6 days ago now and I think it is a HUGE improvement over how it used to look, and my fish love it!

I tried to get the "natural" look with fake plants ect when I first set my tank up and soon thought it didn't look very good at all... so I started looking into live plants and came accross Dustin's videos and other videos of and about dirted tanks, after looking into it some more I made the switch to dirt and live plants!