Balanced Aquarium with Plants and Fish

["Cory Pedersen" <cory at angelcom_com>]

I have a 100 Gallon fish tank with tropical fish in it and it has a 1
inch top soil substrate with a little peat moss and another inch of
gravel.  I used the normal soil to help balance the ph.  Plants do
pretty good for a while then they start getting a little sick looking.
I add a little miracle gro and the perk up.  I'm trying to do very
little water changes.  I hardly feed the fish.  The guppies eat little
hopping bugs that are on the duckweed.  There are snails that are in the
gravel for my clown loaches and I have some Siamese and Chinese algae
eaters and a placosumus.  I'm working on raising mosquito larve for the
rest of the fish to eat.  I'm wondering if there is a way to migrate my
tank into a self sufficient tank that I don't need to do any work.  Has
anyone ever done this before?  Should I have to keep adding nutrients to
the tank for my plants.  Right now the balance seems to be food in
duckweed out.  Maybe I should be introducing new live food that they
can't eat until it matures.  I don't know much about adding food that
has iron in it.  I suspect that the plants need a lot of iron and other
trace elements.

Cory
cory at angelcom_com