Hardwater, moderate? light plants

[nterry]

I have a 55 gallon tank. The water is very hard (15-20), pH is ~8.4. I have 2x54 Watts of T-5 lighting and am dosing with CO2. I dose with one 1 capful of fluorish every week.

Plants that are doing OK (but not great) in this lighting:
java moss (attached to driftwood)
dwarf sag (but hardly spreading after several months)
crypt wendtii (several varieties)--the green is doing OK and has shown a few tiny runners, but the red and bronze are not growing much. They are in two large bunches and don't look great, but there appears to be little new growth--maybe I need to split them?
spiral val is doing OK

Doing poorly or died:
dwarf hairgrass--gone
najas grass--gone
val (straight leaf)--gone
bacopa carolinia--going
bacopa monerii--gone


Any suggestions on what I should use. I am thinking of adding several anubias plants. Any other ideas would be welcome. Thanks,

nterry

[BettaFishMommy]

so your lighting equates to roughly 2 watts per gallon. you may want to look at bumping it up a little, say to 3 watts per gallon? other planted tankers will have better input on wattage than i though.
to be honest, i don't even know what my wattage is for my lights, lol, but my plants grow well, no algae, and everything is healthy.


yes, i would split the wendtii to be planted individually, not kept in bunches. i have wendtii, i think the bronze variety (each planted individually) in my very low tech tank and it does wonderfully at a ph of 7.8. also in this tank are some bacopa (don't know which variety) and they are very green and healthy, albeit they grow very slowly.

one thing i might look at is how deeply the plants are planted. are all the rhizomes on plants free of the substrate? that may be a factor in the growth and health of the plants. i'm no expert when it comes to knowing which plant is what and which ones have rhizomes, but i do know that they need to be not buried.

i would personally go with some swords instead of the anubias. i love the look of a big amazon swordplant, lol.