I finally decided to address my aquarium problem a bit. I should have taken a 'before' picture of the smaller aquarium that the fish are in now. It was almost entirely full of plant stuff (though the tiny fish could still get around) and it turns out that two of the plant species actually grow quite well outside of water as, once they managed to break through the surface, they grow faster and better. Anyway, I removed a lot of the plants to put in my 10 gallon tank, and a lot are just in a bucket, and here's what's left in the 5 gallon that the fish are in now:

I didn't add the filter until two days ago when wondering how much of the green sludge it might prevent from growing on the top.

I pulled out some of the larger chunks but it's generally hard to deal with as it sticks to everything well, especially the plants.

Anyway, here's what I've done to the 10 gallon so far:

It has the same potting soil and manure compost base layer as the 5 gallon tank, since that seemed to work well there, and a thin layer of gravel on top to try to keep it down. I'm not sure if I'm done putting plants in but there's a lot of the kind that have been growing well, and three others that there's only one of (and one of them, I only have one left of, which has never been doing well and looks dead but somehow it is still growing.

I don't expect these plants to continue to look so nice though. They only got that way because they'd broken through the water's surface. I fear they may start doing worse being underwater now. I might plant some in some kind of planter where they can have soaked dirt so as to be sure to always have some available to replant if these die. Also I think that I'm going to leave the 5-gallon tank as it is since it's able to grow these things well and so it can make back-up plants as well. It has some of the other two species that don't grow well in it. Oddly, one of them is the one which was the only one that would grow, and grew a lot at first. Now it took me a while to even remember that I had it, and then find any of it that was still alive.