Why Do My Plants Die Even With the Right Light and Heat?

There are a wide range of benefits from planting in your aquarium and your fish will love you for it.
Invisible in the water, are a wide range of chemicals that your plants need to survive and to do the best job they can for the aquarium.
Deficiencies of chemicals which need to be readily available to live aquarium plants are the chief causes of sickness in them.
The major substances needed by plants must be available in large quantities and are commonly known as macronutrients.
Macronutrients include all of the following: Calcium, Carbon, Carbon Dioxide, Phosphates, Phosphorus, Potassium, Nitrogen, Magnesium, Oxygen and Sulphur.
Any deficiencies of these, will result in a wide range of detrimental affects to your plants.
As this is quite a wide cocktail of substances, it is important for a nutrient rich substrate and fertilizers to be used to ensure the plants have everything they need.
Most substrates will tell you what nutrients they contain, so it is not normally too difficult to check how nutrient rich your substrate of choice is.
if you decide to keep harder plants or have more experience with plants, it is possible to use fertilizers to try and cover any deficiencies.
If you are thinking of keeping harder plants or using fertilizers you will be successful if you feel confident with your understanding of water chemistry.
Using a testing kit to test the levels of the individual macronutrients should be helpful in discover what your water does, or does not, contain.
The most commonly available fertilizers are NO3 (potassium nitrate), K2SO4 (potassium sulfate), and KH2PO4 (mono potassium phosphate).
It is also possible to make your own DIY fertilizers, though like with keeping harder aquarium plants, your knowledge of water chemistry and confidence needs to be enough to handle this properly.
The advantage of making your own fertilizer, measuring out the dry ingredients or making a solution, is it is normally much cheaper.
A tank with a lot of exotic, demanding plants can become very expensive extremely quickly if you are using store-brought fertilization.
Providing that you choose a nutrient rich substrate, you are eliminating a lot of potential deficiency problems right from the start.
The more demanding the plants, the more helpful it is to understand water chemistry so you can react according if they start to sicken.