Webcricket, your plants

Hi lilly! Thank you for your kind words. I am new to planted tanks (have been keeping non-planted for many many years), and have only been working at it for a little over 5 months. There is lots to learn.

The green golf ball looking things are known as " Marimo moss balls". They are really a type of algae, but a non-invasive algae that stays in the ball shape.

The duckweed I have in my 2 gallon is just a very small bit. I've actually been trying to get rid of it, but somehow a piece or two manages to survive and multiply! The filter does blow it around a bit, but it stays on the surface.

All of my tanks are low-light (2 wpg or less of compact fluorescent lighting). I did lots of research and am only keeping plants able to grow in these lighting conditions. There are a surprising number of options for low-light plants (see plantgeek.net for a search of them).

I don't inject CO2 or do any DIY CO2, but I do use Flourish Excel (a liquid carbon source) daily in my 2 wpg 10 and 5 gallon tanks (they contain some stem plants which suffer without these measures). Those two tanks also get dosed with fertilizers almost daily. I don't dose anything in the other tanks, but the lighting is less in those and they don't have stem plants.

It is possible to have a successful algae-free planted tank in low lighting without CO2 and fertilizers, it just takes some planning. My tanks are certainly no where near as good as some of the low light set-ups I've seen out there, but I'm having fun with them! And the folks on the forum here have been most helpful over the past months.

It's just run of the mill pea gravel. A couple of the tanks have fine gravel mixed in, but I don't use plant specific substrates at all.