Lots and lots and lots of light - minimum of 3 watts per gallon, depending
on the depth of your tank, say 20" or so.

IME, it will do fine with less, as long as there's plenty of CO2.

NO D*MN BOTIAS! or anything else that digs or picks at leaf tips or you will
find all your gloss floating at the top of the tank every morning.

My pack of clown loaches don't bother it. They poke around in it a lot, but it
stays rooted. It's the Lilaeopsis and hairgrass they keep digging up.

Pick any big snails out of your tank before you start - by the time the next
generation of snails grows up, the gloss will be well enough established to
handle them.

I had adult apple snails (P. bridgesi) in my tank when I installed the glosso,
and they didn't bother it.

Good luck, gloss is a lot of fun and a lot of work.

I find glosso to be almost no work -- easier to grow than either hairgrass or
Lilaeopsis. (Perhaps because I don't have a mega-bright tank.) It stays very
flat, and spreads only horizontally, not vertically. So I just pull out a
handful or two when it starts encroaching in areas where I don't want it.

(I've heard that if glosso grows well for you, Lilaeopsis won't. So maybe
that's why glosso is a low-maintenance, easy to grow plant for me. I can't
seem to grow Lilaeopsis to save my life. :-P)

Anyway, I have only one "trick" for growing glosso, and that's to plant it
right. If you have the patience, cut it into tiny sections (one pair of leaves
per section) and plant each piece indivually. If you don't have that kind of
patience, plant the stems horizonally in the gravel (fine, sand-like substrate
is better). I plant it as horizontal as possible, then throw a handful of
substrate on top of it, to hold it down. (It's okay to bury some leaves, as
long as some are above the surface.) If you plant it that way, it will grow
horizontally, even with moderate light.


Leigh

http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/halloween/881/