Thought I would bump this because I too would love some new plants in my 10 gal.

The brown stuff is diatoms or brown "algae". Not harmful and very common in new tanks. Diatoms feed off excess silicate. A new tank has alot of silicate because it is caulked with silicone made of glass and has alot off plastic parts. These things all contain silicates. The disolvable silicate will eventually leach out after 6 months to 2 years. The only exception is silicate from your water supply. From the looks of your pics you have very a mild case. The green stuff is just spot algae (appears to be anyway)and is not uncommon. As long as you don't mind it it is OK to have. I like a bit of algae here and there in an aquarium looks healthy and natural to me. If it gets out of hand then you have to many nutrients in the water. Frequent PWCs (partial water changes) will help everything. Minimal feeding also helps. Keep your nitrate level below 40 or less will help. Leave lights down when you are not home, just about 6 hours in a non-planted tank is fine. Another way to keep the nutrients down in a tank is add live plants. But adding plants is another chore in itself at first. Don't do it until you are ready to deal with it. They will also do better if your tank is established more and the gravel is "seasoned". best deffense now is frequent PWCs and proper lighting.

You could also get away with a pair or trio of white cloud mountain fish, especially if you have enough plants and a fluorescent light to let them grow (NOT an incandescent light, it would get too hot with a small tank like that). They now make tiny power filters for nano tanks like that, it would help with the water ecology. White clouds are hardy little minnows, very attractive and lively, and can take room temps down to at least 65 degrees. Make sure you don't overfeed, that fouls the tank quickly.

Dogma is holding firm to the belief that something could neither be a conceptually or practically superior practice because you believe something else seems to be satisfactory - 'works for me'. Old beliefs are like a pair of old shoes - we often value their comfort so much we tend to ignore the fact they're full of holes. Almost everyone prefers the relative comfort of belief to the exercise of reason because believing is easier than reasoning; which brings us full circle to why there are so many more believers than thinkers. My $.02 I'm pretty sure you're not suggesting that a haphazard approach (a little of this and a little of that, even though I know neither what the plant needs nor what I'm giving it) is a superior approach to a well-reasoned supplementation plan. Discounting all reason because we're satisfied with the status quo is self-limiting by default. BTW - if Punky's trees are in pots (don't think that was made clear), moving closer to how nature does things is an exercise fraught with obstacles. Growing in the ground and growing in pots are widely divergent cultures. On a scale of 1-10 with growing in the ground being a 1 and hydroponic growing a 10, conventional container culture is probably a 7 or 8. Al