breeding blue rams

You can sex them by checking length of dorsal fin and mainly the females will have a pink belly.

Yeah good luck on the breeding factor my friend that's the same issues i have here as well very hard water and high Ph..

It can be done with the breeding but your gonna have to bring those perimeters down, woods, peat and other natural compounds will bring down the Ph and Hardness for you, its going to be a lot of work on your end and you may even want to invest into a rain barrel collection device so you can use rain water as top offs or water changes..

Good luck my friend..

Sand substrate will be perfect, just be sure not to get white aragonite (probably stating the obvious there). The best method of sexing rams is by the red belly blush of the females; dorsal is a second indicator but not always accurate, the males first two rays tend to be longer.
If they were to breed in those params, you may still have trouble getting viable eggs due to the hardness. You could try keeping them in RO water with a little added tap water or minerals for buffering, it's usually a pretty cheap and stable route to go for small tanks. As already mentioned, peat moss can be used to lower the pH and hardness even more. If your water is VERY hard, a combination of the two might be the most effective. However, if you go with unprocessed peat (as in loose in a bag from the garden center at a dept. store) it will make your water tea-colored. I've heard the pellets don't as much. Hopefully someone here knows more on that subject, I lost patience with peat moss a couple years back.
If you can, try to get a LFS to test your tank water for KH, GH and pH and post the results here. Even better, get a liquid test kit so you can monitor it regularly if you're going to be messing with the parameters at all, until you have a steady/stable routine.

DEV has a good post.

gh needs to be low...it helps keep the eggs permeable.

high gh leads to tougher eggs = lower fertilization.

look into RO has stated.

I think it's more about gh than kh....you may need to try reducing the gh..peat is usually used to lower pH but I am not sure it has much effect on the gh of the water.

I agree, breeding may happen in hard water but the chances of eggs getting fertilized is lower.

I'm unsure about peat but tha advantage of RO is that you can mix and match with tap to get your desired results.