New to live plants

[flitabout]

In higher light tanks plants needs are different. More light means that are going to need more food to process or photosynthesize. Means the plant will need more co2 to breath. Anything out of balance and other issue will start to show up. Mineral deficiencies will show up faster with holes and discolored leaves. One little hole in the balance and your whole tank can turn into an algae farm.
This is my tank under high light without proper ferts I was also battling an outbreak of black beard algae. My plants grew slowly but they looked awful.


So I bumped up the glut, started dosing pps-pro and started DIY co2. My plants went nuts and the green was finally really dark healthy green my staurogyne repens and dhg really started to carpet and the bba is gone. In a month and a rescape ( I had to add more plant because I killed a bunch of them trying to kill the algae) it looked like this.



After finally removing the wisteria, the a couple of the crypts and 2 of the hygrophila Angustifolia it looked like this. My swords are now 20+ inches tall and actually coming out of the tank. Root tabs on heavy root feeders like crypts, swords, and the wisteria made all the difference in the world.

 

[flitabout]

It's the color spectrum that it important. You want to go for a k rating of 5500-10,000. 6500 being the optimal number to look for.

 

[Thepokerkid227]

The flora suns are 5000k and the ultra suns are 6500k, gonna go swap out one of the floras for an ultra tomorrow, and start to get some amazons for the backgroud

 

[flitabout]

Pick up some root tabs for them as they heavy root feeders

 

[Thepokerkid227]

Not sure if it has anything to do with the plants or root tabs but I woke up this morning to slightly cloudy water and some rust colored patches on my PFS substrate, any ideas?

 

[Fresh2o]

Looks like diatoms. Pretty harmless and should go away on its own.

 

[Thepokerkid227]

Should I get it off or just let it go?

 

[Fresh2o]

Let it go. It should disappear on its own.

 

[flitabout]

What plants did you get?

 

[Thepokerkid227]

Got some amazon swords, penny wort, and red "something" forgot the name the LFS store guy helped me out and suggested those three for now as background plants. Maybe you can ID them from this pic

 

[Thepokerkid227]

Another question I had was he said not to put temp over 80 as it will kill the plants, however I am only a few days into fishless cycle and would like to raise the temp a bit to get things moving, will doing so really kill the plants?

 

[flitabout]

I looks like some sort of hygro maybe the compacta? Yes you can go ahead and turn the temp up. Temp in my cycling tank is 82 and that's only cause I have a crappy heater. Otherwise it would be 86F!

 

[Thepokerkid227]

Plants won't die off?