Perhaps is the camera but your tank looks dark, as in not enough light? My tank is only a little over 3 months old and I'm trying to create an environment for good plant growth too. I'm also having algae issues which I'm trying to control with lighting adjustment and less feeding of my fish. I've been doing with root tabs for couple of months but my plants seemed to have stalled in term of growth. So for about 2 weeks now I've been dosing the API CO2 booster daily and my plants seems to be responding. My plants seems to be a greener and the leaves are getting taller and new shoots are sprouting. I have one SAE that seems to be eating the brown algae on the leaves, so I'm happy about that. I've never removed the plants from my thank to scrape the algae off. I did have some leaves develop brown spots then all brown and I removed them. I also have nasty BGA that grown on my sand and I try to control that by vacuuming that out every 2 weeks and cleaning it with chlorine. My substrate is just PFS with root tabs. So far my plants seems to be doing ok, better recently.
