beginning planted tank

It really depends on the plants and how they are planted and the fish you keep, I like low tech. easy keepers like vallisenarias, esp. corkscrew and spiral vals, also sagitterias and pygmy swords, as well as elodea and cabomba. When I kept cryptos, dwarf pond lilies, and pygmy japanese lotus, I would use a mix of sand, peatmoss, and potting soil in a small pot and occasionally use a basting syringe to add some filter sludge to the pots. I probably do everything wrong and would kill any of the more delicate plants but it seemed to work for me.

Fertilisers would be good but if you dont want to spend, you can just use a layer of potting soil under your substrate and it works for most plants.

some other easy maintenance plants are java fern, anubias, and bolbita fern. these are all low light plants(they do best at about 2 watts a gal) they are thick leaved plants will stand up to a fair ammount of abuse from fish. they can be grown in the soil, or you can attatch them to driftwood or rocks. use some cotton thread, tie it to whatever, and by the time the thread dissintegrates, the roots should have attatched themselves to the wood or rock. as far as fertilizer goes it's a good idea. i reccomend Flourish it's easy to dose once or twice a week.

i used to do the laterite additon to the gravel with success... i now use this black bio-substrate from caribsea with good success... i also use flourish excel from seachem, a liquid carbon additive... plants are going crazy with this stuff!