Hi.

I have a recently set up 75 gallon tank. I am getting back into the hobby
after a long lay off, and have been so busy learning about water chemistry
that I haven't paid much attention to plants at all. I have a bunch of
silk plants in my tank, and only two live plants -- a java fern and a java
sword. The sword is doing great, and seems to be growing rapidly. The
fern lost its biggest leaf when I put it in my tank, but now it, too,
seems to be recovering and growing nicely.

I took one bit of advice from the newsgroup/web and replaced the bulbs in
my light fixtures, however I still am probably on the low end of W/gallon.
The LFS tells me (verfied on-line) that the two plants I bought are low
light, though, so I think I'm ok in the short term.

My question is... where do I go from here? I definitely want to add more
plants, and can use any advice from the group.

Here are some specific questions:

1) In the short term, would Seachem Flourish be beneficial to my two
plants?

2) If I'm not interested in adding CO2, should I just forget about more
plants? That is, is a CO2 system of some sort an absolute necessity?

3) Any recommendations for floating plants? My gouramis love the plastic
plants I've floated for them, and it would be nice to replace them with
live plants.

Just FYI, my aquarium info is:

75 gal
pH 7.2 (brought down slowly from 7.6 by driftwood addition)
8 dKH
13 dGH
not sure of the NO3 level -- I don't have a test kit for it yet.
my substrate is a mix of pea gravel from the local hardware store and
polished river stones from Petco.

36 various dwarf fish (honey gouramis, threadfin rainbows, pygmy
corydoras, and a few others)

Any advice appreciated!

--chris





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