Our municipality has basically a village-wide-basement-water-softener. I'm grateful to them for removing the iron and sulfur, which have always been hated presences in other suburbs with wells south of Chicago. However the sodium in the water is hard on houseplants and the blood pressure of older residents.

Desertification in the planter is not a happy scene.

Lots of killies, which reproduced like weeds, stopped leaving viable eggs when we moved here. (The water tasted so good I though they had "Chicago" or Lake Michigan water.) When rainwater was added to some of the tap water,some fish began laying fertile eggs. When the RO was completely remade, more began leaving good eggs. King's Tetra fry began appearing with the folks - that was a pretty cool surprise even if they are an "easy" tetra to spawn.

Of course many North American killies, the livebearers (actually there are a couple of soft water South American livebearers) and the small Rift Lake Cichlids thrived in the hard, salty, alkaline tap water. If I had more of them, I would have piped the RO outflow to them. Hummmm...

Speaking of plants, does your LFS display any plants other than the salt tolerant Vals, hornwort, Java fern, sags, maybe the Java moss and Najas and not too much else? There are a lot of plants, which will survive slightly saline water for a while, but not for years.

This is a little off topic, but it has been a while since houseplants and bog plants offered for sale as aquarium plants have been mentioned. Most of them will live for a couple of months under water. By then they are in someone's home and the local aquarist mistakenly thinks that they just can't keep plants alive.

Bullwinkle! It has to do with those palms, Sandrianas, prayer plants, and marsh plants (which legitimately are submerged annually for a couple of months) being sold. It is a clever ploy.

Asked a friend who used to have a shop, why in the world he would stock Sandriana. He replied," I tried not to. The customers yelled at me!" I guess if "we" as consumers demand or at least buy these things, we should expect them to continue in shops.