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I noticed within the past week or 2 that there has been some mild beard algae growth. It is growing on a piece of driftwood that extends upward near the light and aa little bit on some of my crypt leaves. I also noticed a few sprouts of it on a rock on the bottom of the tank. On the driftwood, there is also 1 piece of beard algae.

I would hate my planted tank to go bad after running successfully algae free for 8 months. There are 2 ottos in there right now that do a great job on eating the brown algae at any first signs of it, but they don't touch the beard algae.

So here is my plan. I am going to remove the algae covered driftwood because that is the only area in the tank that it is really bad and then I will get more plants. I will plant some "nutrient sucker" stem plants in the area where the drifwood originally took up. I will also do a 25% regular water change and then add carbon to the filter to remove the liquid plant fertilizer that I added last week because I think that the fertilizer is helping out the algae. How does that sound? If I can I will try to get a SAE, since the eat hair/beard algae, but my LFS never has them.

~*~ Caviar? no thanks! ~*~

I bought a Florida flagfish and they're great for eating beard algae

They even have a profile of it on this site, check it out

You can get SAE on this site:
http://www.aquariumfish.net/catalog_pages/scavengers/scavengers.htm

Well what about my other plans? I only want to add more fish to the tank as a last resort as it is already fully stocked with:

1 male blue ram
1 lace catfish
5 white clouds
2 zebra danios
2 ottos

.....and a bunch of plants

~*~ Caviar? no thanks! ~*~

Your plan sounded good. In the beginning of this year, my 55gal was covered in beard algae and long stringy stuff. Even though I did cheat a little to get rid of it, it's all gone. All I had in the tank was Golden AE at the time.

1. I put brand new filter media in my Magnum 350. This did not seem to hurt my bio filtering much.

2. I used algae fix for about 2 weeks. A little drop bottle that is safe to use with plants. Be carful with this. It will help annialate all algae and your ottos may go hungry. After using this stuff my GAE did not look too healthy. They don't seem to go for the algae waffer much either.

3. After all this, my plants took a big leap and what was left of the algae disappeared and pretty much stayed that way. I had added Hornwort not too long before this so that could have helped. I had fast growing plants already, but hornwort is supposed to leach out a sub. that fight algae.

4. I had also removed my micron filter from my magnum from the algae bloom I had. This could have been filtering out some of my fert. for the plants even though I fert. everyday. I don't think taking away fert. help all too much. Most nutrients algae feeds on are not contained in the better water plant fertilizers. If you take the fert away, (even though they can store large amounts of most nutrients) your plants may hurt the most from this.

It was a tuff job getting rid of it all!