My goal is to get to 2-5 ppm Mg and 10-20 ppm Ca.

Understanding the Mg and Ca concentrations are nearly impossible to measure practically, I used published reports about the water chemistry at the reservior where my tap originates from to estimate a baseline, then calculated the amount of Equilibrium required to get me somewhere in that range.

I’m glad you’ve found the guides useful . You should definitely take off the metal strip that is used in shops. It can hurt the roots and it is generally a bad idea to plant with them attached. As for the piece of wood, it depends on whether the roots have actually anchored themselves within the wood (sometimes sellers sell anubias and java ferns that are growing on small pieces of driftwood) or whether the wood is just there with the roots tied to it. If it is the former, you can leave it as is (if you are okay with the wood in your tank) as the roots are already well settled and established within the wood. If the latter, I’d definitely get rid of the wood.

When you plant, make sure that the roots are under the gravel so that the plant is anchored. Just make sure that for plants like anubias and java fern, that you don’t bury the rhizome under the substrate as it will kill the plant. For those types of plants, you can try to use an anchor to keep them down initially while they take root within the substrate.

Good luck!

I’ve read two of your guides (both on low tech) and I really appreciate you doing this for the lot of us out there, the guides are really helpful I have to say!

Though I’ve one question, the local fish shops around my vicinity, sells a lot of plants, they are all bound together by a piece of wool and further tighten by metal pieces. When I actually want to plant in into my aquarium, should I take those off or leave them be?

I thank you in advance and I look forward to your reply

Thanks a lot for the compliments. Since I was using fluorescent Spiral bulbs which are not very efficent at lighting tanks, I was using 3 WPG (2x15W 6500K GE Spiral bulbs)when I was supplementing the tank with Excel as a carbon source. Later on I backed off from dosing Excel (made it a total low-tech tank with once a week fert dosing) and switched the lights to 2x10W spiral bulbs at 2 WPG. Again, keep in mind that if one were using T5 tubes one would need to use much lower WPG since they are far more efficient at lighting tanks.

As for the plants, the driftwood has Philippine Java Fern (I would strongly recommend this variant. I bought it off ebay from a seller called Aquaticmagic) with Anubias Coffeefolia (deep ridged texture and dark green color) along with a few anubias nana petite. The foreground carpet plant is dwarf hairgrass. It is a bit tricky to grow out and maintain and actually requires Excel supplementation in the very least to do well in a tank. The plants in the background are predominantly rotala rotundifolia.

I strongly recommend these plants for a low-tech tank (except maybe the hairgrass which can be a lot of work and hard to grow out).

You photos are beautiful and your guides very helpful! Thanks!

I was just wondering if you could list what species of plants (particularly the grass cover) you are growing and how much wattage per gallon you are at? Cheers!