new to plant keeping

i have read plants do not like air stones in the tank because it effects co2 and water stats for plant growth, if the tube was clamped so only a smll amount of bubbles got out would this still be to much. also do you have to have latrate in the gtavel or can you just add fert?

oooops this should have gone into tropical plants NOT coldwater

What type of tank do you intend to set up, lightly or heavily planted? how much light will you use and how big is the tank?

record 60 tank. have just added extra light to the hood which i will post pics of shortly. that will give 30w over 50l tank quite heavy planted 15 plants in total.

Normally you wouldn't use an airstone in a planted tank especially if you only use DIY CO2, because you can struggle to generate enough CO2 with DIY and any extra surface agitation will only outgas or drive off what you have generated, but if you useing pressurised CO2 then thats a different matter as you can control the CO2 output, and basically you can just add more, recent discussions on dedicated planted tank forums have shown that running an airstone in a planted tank isn't a bad idea at all, but normally people that do so have pressurised systems where they can add more CO2 to achieve the required levels.

You can have a planted tank with only normal gravel if you wish, and as long as the plants you want to grow are not too demanding this shouldn't be a problem, but if you want to grow any carpeting type plants like glosso or HC then you will probably require some sort of nutritious bottom for these plants, some plants will just do poorly in ordinary gravel, substrates like laterlite have whats called CEC or "cation exchange capibilities" basically it means the laterite has the ability to retain nutrients which can then be slowly fed to the roots of plants, ordinary gravel does not have this ability as it is in itself, inert. If you dont use some sort of dedicated substrate additive like laterite try and use a small gravel of 1-3mm in size, the ordinary pea gravel we normally use is too big for most plants so try and find something a bit smaller, i have seen very small gravel in a good few places these days.