Plants For Beginner With New Set Up

i am new to fish keeping, my tank is 71cm wide x 51cm deep and 65cm high and a new set up with 2 x L5 lights. I have kivu medium river sand as a substrate (hopefully this is ok as i want either corys or chain loach) and a very large piece of bog wood. Please can anyone recommend which plants will be best to start off with. thanks.

The problem with sand or gravel is that they don't have any nutrients the roots of the plants can feed off of. So plants might not really thrive in such substrate.

Personally, I'd go with Sue's advice and go for the plants you can attach on the wood, like anubias, java fern and bucephalandra. They look really good and are very undemanding.

You can also get various types of moss, like java moss, spiky moss or Christmas moss. They can be attached to wood, stones etc, they grow fast and can look really nice.

Another plant that grows attached to wood is bucephalandra.

To grow plants in sand you can use root tabs which I ill provided the nutrients the sand is lacking. This is would mark an you could probably grow most 'easy' plants.

I would also consider getting some Malaysian trumpet snails which will bury into the sand during the daytime and ensure you dont get any stagnant areas which can produce a dangerous gas harmful to your fish. Another way to avoid this is to only have a thin sand layer.

Amazon Sword and other Echinodorus plants will likely grow well as they are very hardy indeed (some have success growing them attached to wood also but I would plant them as they are root feeders primarily).

As well as mosses there are also Marino balls (actually a type of algae) which will pretty much grow anywhere.

These are just quite few very hardy species, take a look at http://tropica.com/en/plants/ for other easy plants.

I find moss balls, anubias and bucephalandra ‘wavy leaf’ the easiest to keep; the former sits on the substrate or can be placed on top of a tiny terracotta pot, while the latter two are attached to redmoor wood. I’ve tried a whole range of other easy/medium-care plants, leaving them in their pots, and all have done reasonably well, especially considering that I don’t put in anything to “help” them. Hygrophila polysperma, echinodorus martii and the red plants alternanthera reineckii/rosaefolia seem to do well. Floating plants seem to be faring much better since I bought a fish feeding square to contain them in – keeps them in one place rather than them getting pushed around the tank and caught behind/around the filter or heater.

I’ve always had difficulty with java moss (never lasts longer than a couple of weeks), vallis, dwarf hairgrass and water sprite (none lasted long on any of the 2-3 occasions when I tried them). Java fern has continued to live in the 10-11 months since I’ve been keeping live plants but never looks as though it’s thriving.

Hope that helps.