Jake’s Planted Aquarium Pages

Time, Temperature/Weather… sounds like a commercial for a news station, but it is what you need to keep in the front of your mind when shipping plants. The idea is to take as less time shipping plants as possible, with temperatures that will neither melt/burn nor freeze your plants in transit.

Before we go into anything else, I would suggest you look up the temps of the city you are shipping plants to. It might not hurt to get a week-long forecast either at Weather.com or somewhere similar. It’d be pretty bad to ship plants and the day you ship is day 1 of a heat wave from your area all the way to where you are shipping, or day 1 of a blizzard at your end and a blizzard at theirs, with nothing but cold in between.

I recommend USPS priority mail for shipping live aquarium plants because , quite frankly, it is the cheapest method that will still get your plants to where they are going in a time-efficient manner. They say 2 days, but it can take anywhere from 1 ( if within the state usually) to 4 days, but of course there are those times when it takes longer or the package is lost for what seems forever.

Here is the skinny on USPS priority mail - Use delivery confirmation, without fail. Then there is no ” I sent you the plants four days ago.” and they’re all ” Well, I can’t tell. Where is it?” Delivery confirmation is your best proof that you mailed a package on a certain day and it is on the way. The person you’re mailing the plants to can easily look up the delivery confirmation number you provide for the package and see that you sent a package to them on this day at that time. Much easier than scanning a receipt from the post office and mailing it to them, which is not proof most people would accept anyway. The delivery confirmation doesn’t provide real good tracking information, as far as where the package is exactly, but your post office can usually use it to track down a lost package and it’s better to have than your receipt.

As far as packaging goes, I recommend the USPS’s new priority mail “shoeboxes” for long plants. It’s a fairly long box with ample room for quite a few plants. The boxes are free from the post office and can be ordered off of their “store site” here. The 0-1092 boxes on the first page are nice and thin, but tall and good for long stem plants as well. For other plants, such as clumps of moss, sometimes small padded envelopes work well depending upon the amount, or even a small padded envelope inside of a flat rate priority envelope. Experiment a bit and see what you come up with. Like I said, the USPS boxes are FREE!

Ok, I got all that junk. How do I actually package them and get them in the box and stuff?

That depends on the plant, as I eluded to earlier, but there are a few constant standards that should help.

You will need bags, first of all. If shipping long, fragile stem plants you aren’t going to want to try to bend them too much so you’ll need a bag that will accomodate the plant. Aquabid.com has a good shipping supplies section full of wide range of bags that will suit your needs. I would get at least 50 tall/skinny bags ( I use bags that are 18″ long and 6″ wide). If you don’t need a bag that long, no worries because the extra length will allow you to tie off the bag easier at worst. For mosses or other real small plants, I would buy some double-zipper quart ziplocks. The double zippered ones are for extra protection because if the zipper pops open your plants are ruined.

Other materials include newspapers and white, fluffy, soft filter floss like you’d buy at the pet store in a big bag. Yes, you heard me right…. filter floss.

I received some plants a couple weeks ago or so and they looked like they had just come out of the person’s tank, even though they spent 4 days in transit. That is a rare thing. The thing this person did differently is to wrap the plant in moist filter floss. I tried it and by gosh it works.

Step by step - Take your plants or plant trimmings out of the tank and give them a good rinse in the sink. It’s better to first fill the sink and then rinse in the basin if you have high water pressure and it’s difficult to control. We’re not trying to powerwash the plants here. Make sure if you have snails that you rinse all of the snails off and as many eggs as you can. Disinfect the plants as appropriate ( check here for methods of disinfection).

Next, wet some fliter floss in dechlorinated water and spread it out a bit on a flat surface. Take your plant or plants and wrap the filter floss around the plant so that nothing is exposed. Slide the floss/plants into a bag and either tie it off or ziplock the bag, whichever the case.

Now take some newspaper and crumple a bit and fill in any dead spaces in the box with it. Styrofoam peanuts also work, as does bubble wrap, but I like newspaper because it’s absorbent. If the worst happens and the bag busts, it won’t make a wet spot on the outside of the box. The USPS throws those kind of boxes away so they won’t mess up other mail. Place the bag in and put more crumpled newspaper on top. The idea is to make it so the bag of plants isn’t sloshing all around the box getting damaged. A good tip here is to not try to put too many plants in one single bag. 2-3 stem plants maximum, or a single medium sized sword plant, or 5 very small crypts, etc. You don’t want the plants to rub or bang together either, and typically a big ol’ wad of plants does not travel well. The fewer plants you can put in a bag that are directly touching eachother the better.

In the winter months, sheet insulation can be purchased at home improvement stores and be cut ( electric bread knife works great) to size and used to line a box when shipping plants. This will hopefully keep the plant from freezing. I do NOT recommend using a heatpack, as this is almost always a great way to cook plants. They might freeze 1/3 of the time, but that’s better than being cooked 2/3 of the time. I find cold packs in the summer to be rather frivolous as well.

I like stamps.com for sending out my packages, but USPS also has Click N Ship if you have a decent scale for weighing your packages. Right on their site you can schedule a pickup of your package so that the next day the mail runs, your carrier will pick your priority box up for you that you’ve left at your front door or whatever, for free. This is nice, especially if you’re like me at absolutely hate going to the Post Office. You’d think they’d pick up your package anyway, but apparently they don’t have to, even if they are delivering you mail that day. I guess it’s a space thing.

You can use the instant notification thing, if you plugged in the recipient’s email, and it will email them and tell them all the info. Otherwise, you should contact the person to whom you are shipping the plants to and tell them you have shipped the plants, and give them the delivery confirmation number. If you had gone to the post office and paid for delivery confirmation ( it’s free online… comon’ people) then be sure to keep the stub from the delivery confirmation slip so you have the number.

Some of you may have noticed that I did not recommend writing or stamping anything on the box. This is for you and your post office to decide. Personally, I use ” fragile” and/or “liquid” stamps which I own myself. I find that postal employees handle boxes that have those two stamps on them a bit better because they don’t know what the liquid is and don’t want to risk getting the latest urinalysis test samples on themselves .There is a little bit of water in the bags, however, so I think the “liquid” stamp is not misleading.

Rule #1, however, is do not lie to your post office about what you are sending … there is no reason to as aquarium plants are sent all around the country every day. If nothing else, call and ask them what should be written on the box if you have questions or concerns.

Also, don’t go writing a book of directions in red ink on the box because , quite frankly, nobody is going to read it. ” Live aquarium plants, please keep from freezing. Place in front door.” , ” Live aquarium plants, keep from direct sun or heat. Keep shaded.”, and such written on the box is pointless. They are going to do whatever they want to with that box, and it will probably be the same thing they did with the last 15000 boxes that went through their hands that work week.

If putting stuff like that, ( a “book of directions”), on the box is requested by the person you’re sending it to, then fine… maybe they know their mail carrier well and have it worked out with them… but I wouldn’t waste the ink on your own accord.

Another very important part about shipping plants or plant trimmings: MAKE SURE PLANTS YOU SEND ARE LEGAL WHERE YOU ARE SENDING THEM TO. You need to make sure they’re legal to transport across state lines at all, for that matter. There are a few plants in the aquarium trade that are considered to be noxious weeds in some, or even many, states in the U.S., or even abroad for that matter. There are also newly enforced, but not “new”, laws about shipping snails, whether on purpose or by accident, and how it relates to shipping plants that may contain snails or snail eggs. Make sure you’re in accordance with the laws before you send your plants somewhere. Contact your local USDA service center if you have any unanswered questions.