Just get nice clean feature bits, tends to make the water slightly alkaly but u can adjust it and after a while u won't hav to adjust it cause it will become neautral pretty much

I've been doing fresh water aquariums with live plants for close to 30 years now. The basic setup I use is 1 to 2 inches of dirt covered by 2 inches of 1-2mm gravel. The dirt has varied from garden center top soil (make darn sure that there is on fertilizer or chemicals added) to plain dirt from my back yard. I run 2 to 3 watts of full spectrum fluorescent light per gallon and have CO2 injection setup.

For a huge amount of information go to Aquatic Plant Central. There are several different forum sub groups. I lean towards a modified version of the "El Natural" setup as promoted by Diana Walstad.

Go to Aquatic Plant Central and start reading. Everything from El Natural to the folks that think aquariums should be run like a chemistry lab.

Here is a link to a post I did on APC a couple of years ago showing an El Natural tank from 15 years ago with a guest that seemed to think it was nice... Visitor to El Natural tank

Search the APC forum for gpimm to see the rest of my stuff.

Gary