And here I was thinking I'd had an original idea when I decided to go with cactus soil.
It's too early to say if this is going to work in the long run, since the tank i less than two months old, but I've had no problems so far. The clay in the cactus soil clouds the water easily, so you do need a layer of sand on top (my bristlenose has decided to make a nest under the bogwood, and she has excavated all the way through the sand to the soil. Now my water is constantly mildly cloudy and I need to figure out a way to fix this).
I wouldn't add fish in the first month or so, because it takes this soil a while to get used to being submerged. It burped up some ammonia and H2S early on, but this stopped in ~3 weeks. If you find a brand that has very little or no compost matter (just peat, clay and sand), this shouldn't happen.
Amazon swords seem to like this stuff. Here's what I started with (can you tell I didn't have a clue about planting densely enough when I started this?):
And here are the same plants and their descendants 5 weeks later (a bit messy since I took this in the middle of some pruning and replanting):
The Echinodorus boliviensis(?) is propagating like crazy. Sorry about the criminally bad cell phone photos. And never mind the Hygrophila jungle, they're on their way out as soon as the LFS gets the Alternathera reineckii and Heteranthera zosterifolia I need.
