Another Newbie Needs Help With Dying Plants In 75 Gallon Tank

Hello all,

Thanks for reading this, hopefully some of you will be able to help me out. I have a 75 gallon freshwater tank stock with a bala shark, 9 tetras, 6 danios and 2 albino bristle nose plecos. The tank had been experiencing extremely high nitrate level so I decided to get some plants to help regulate things. I purchased roughly $80 of low tech plants (anubias, java fern, water wisteria, water sprite, elodea, ludiwigia dark red, ludwigia repens, red flame sword, kleiner bar sword, hygro compact, hygro willow, creeping charlie, broadleaf saggitara, crypts and ludwigia peruensis. I got a black gravel and root tabs and Easy Green from Aquariun Co-op but almost all of the plants are dead or dying. I don't have CO2 but I dose CO2 booster from API daily. I have two 6500k Phillips CFL light bulbs along with a LED hood light that has white and a few blue LED. My husband turn lights on at around 7 am and then turn off all but the blue night mode at 8pm and then I turn all lights off between 11-12am. I have a Marineland HOB, Marineland internal polishing filter, a SUNSUN 304B canister with UV light sterlizer and a Elheim 3 tray canister. I am thinking about the PPS pro system and adding Fe gluconate to that. Im including some pics so you can see what I am talking about.

 

Thanks so much for your reply, it is really encouraging especially because I am new at this and started to think I should just quit and go back to plastic plants and tons of chemicals. I will remove the weights from the stems and just let them float and see how it goes. My water is extremely soft, Im in Georgia and it comes out the tap very soft and acidic. I will reduce the amount of time the lights are on to 8-9 hours, I thought the fish needed 10-12 hours of light. I don't have algae yet. I will look for vallisneria and see if I can get it to grow. Should the vallisneria be planted deep into the substrate or slightly above like Anubias and crypts? Thanks for help and advice.