New 30g : A few pointers if you would

[Arinon]

MTS strikes again. Have a 75g setup for a couple months that I'm still on the fence about stocking and I stumbled into a 30g tank and figured I wanted to try live plants, see what I can do. Need a few pointers.

Even reading some info on lighting I'm a little confused. As I already picked up a strip for it so I figure its easier to just ask where I'll stand lightwise and work from there. Going to be using a 36" Coralife fixture and it has a 96W 6.7k PC bulb. This was labeled a freshwater bulb so I assume all that light is 'useable' by the plants and want to know where I stand in terms of total light. I really don't want to mess with CO2 if I can get away with it, but a weekly fert or two would not be a problem

The other question, well more of a comment. For substrate I plan to use Turface MVP as I have a bag of this sitting around that I used for bonsai soil. My current tank as PFS as a substrate and the few plants I tried to use in that were a pain to keep rooted. Will this be a problem with Turface, as it's larger but lighter. Or is there anything I could add to this to make the planting in general easier.

As far as plants, undecided, but they have to be commonly available for the time being but don't need to be too fancy. I think something that covers the bottom would be neat to try but this is normally a harder type of plant to find?

 

[gheitman]

The light fixture that you purchased does output good light for plants, but with 96W of light over a 30g tank you are going to run into serious algae problems without some kind of CO2 injection (i.e. DIY or something similar).

 

[Purrbox]

If you don't want to mess around with CO2 you would be best off replacing the bulb with a 50/50 bulb. For the most part actinic light is not usable by plants, so this would effectively half the amount of light over the tank. This would probably give you somewhere between low and medium light.

Turface MVP should work well and is fairly easy to plant in. About the only thing that you are likely to have problems with are plants that have a very fine root structure. Until the plants get established you'll need to be a bit more careful with your maintenance to avoid accidently uprooting them. Nothing major though.

If you went with the full wattage of the bulb you could grow a variety of foreground plants, however since you will probably be running with only half about your main options would be either clovers (Marsilea sp.) or mosses. If you can find it Marsilea Minuta (Dwarf Clover) is especially nice. Otherwise I would recommend browsing around the PlantGeek Plant Guide and seeing what you like in their low and medium low light categories.