I still do water changes often because i'm a nut that way, but if i miss a week not much of a problem. For the plants i add a capfull of iron once a week. for feeding is a small scoop of pellets in the morning and one at night with the odd block of red worms thrown in. I have enough little busy nose pleco's in there that there's no algea in the tank. I found due to not having an over flow in the tank (my mistake) there is less problems of high nitrates do to less protein and fresh foods also lest shopping and preparing foods. Seems easyier to me so far.