hey BK
those blue rams your looking for are they the green ones with the blue dots all overhalf the body, with a few black oval like strips (http://www.aquaworldaquarium.com/The_Su ... e_Ram.html) .
I remember at one stage they were quite common in chch stores, not very colourful ones but they where butterflys. Anyways a little while ago I brought some off a local breeder, may I add they were alot better than the ones in the store. I'll e-mail you his number (if I still got it) if you want. You'll have to ask him if he still breeds them becasue it was a little while back.
oh and your valls, your problem is that you probaby dont have enough light I found that was my problem after trying to grow plants after 5 years or so(added more tubes). I now have a 400mm deep 10 gallon with four 24" tubes running through it with one 18w philips 84,and three 20w bio-life fluorescent tubes (alot of red 6500K suposably, this was on a spetrograph on the pactaging) which I brought back from Hong Kong.Things seem to be going good as i've only had a plant setup going for 3 weeks. I read on a an article about NASA growing plants in space, it said that their plants were growing under mostly the red end of the spectrum(6000 to 7000 kelvin)and a little blue(4000 to 5000 kelvin).Water absorbs more of anything over 6000k just like Suphew mentioned . someone I brought plants off recently reconed that when you go about 10cm below the water the light intensity basicly halfs, he also thought that colour spectrum didn't matter that much: most of his tanks were about 300mm deep and had one fluorescent tube.
woah you have a pretty deep tank im not too sure how much light intensity you'll need to reach the bottom.
this site might be useful
http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aphalo/old_pages/lamps.html
source http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aphalo/old_pages/photobio.html
I havn't used any of the lamps on that page myself but its an interesting page
jordan