[Peter Finke]

1. The Paro book is in German, but it can be bought by Amazon (mentioning an easy method).
2. C. wendtii is not a blackwater plant. You could try it, but remember that it is dependent from nutrional sources that hardly can be combined with a stable blackwater milieu. You will not meet an optimum for both Paros and C. wendtii from Sri Lanka clear waters.
3. Peat is not peat and sand is not sand; this information is not precise enough. But I am more interested in the height of your bottom layer. You don’t need a normal aquarium’s height. It could complicate the care to large an extent. If you want to breed your fish, you should begin with an optimum environment for them and not with a compromise. The fish-plant-combination that we like to see in aquariums is a gardening-idea; the peat bogs look entirely different.
4. “tons” of leaf litter?
5. If there are a few submerged plant in peat bogs, surely not C. wendtii. Until now we cannot reproduce the milieu for the special crypts of very acid milieus. They are sometimes cultivated in emersed a form in special materials, but I don not now of any stable and easily managable method for submerged forms of e.g. C. pallidinervia or C. bullosa.
6. I like Walstad, but she writes on a normal planted aquarium and does not treat a blackwater milieu with pH often below 5 or less and nearly no minerals in the water. She would warn us to create such environments if plants in mind.
7. Nearly all Caridinia spec. cannot stand such a milieu for longer than some weeks. One of our next tasks for research is to determine which shrimps live in the Paro-biotopes. There are often lots. Hitherto they are not available in the aquarium trade.