Plants & Cycling

[Aqua Tom]

Newbie question alert!


I am currently cycling my tank (fishless) & was planing on adding some plants just before my fish. On reading the plant forum on here it appears that plants will actualy starve the filter of ammonia so kill the bacteria.

errr, am I missing somthing here?

What I mean by that is will I undo all my hard work & patience by adding plants?

 

[ian]

the problem with fishles cycling and plants is, that most plants need light. Ammonia and light isn't a good thing as you'll get algae. It won't affect your filter at all, it'll help it with the workload, but not whilst fishless cycling. My tank is 90% planted but i still have to rely on a filter.

 

[Uriel]

Yeah i'm fishlessly cycling with plants in. But then i had already bought the plants before i realised. The amount of ammonia they seem to use is pretty negligible imho. I'm only lightly planted for the size of tank but in the first week the ammonia level didn't really budge until the filter bacteria kicked in.

 

[waterdrop]

Agree with ianho, nearly all of our concerns are with algae since ammonia plus light is what triggers the universally present algae spores to activate. It is worth the beginner thinking about the fact that a fishlessly cycling tank is a significantly abnormal environment for both plants and algae: Since there are no fish, the tank does not yet have macronutrients for the new plants and since to the extent that a large number (not what beginners hardly ever have) of plants would absorb a lot of ammonia, the ammonia readings we see may not reflect bacteria progress.

In practice, the majority of fishless cycles proceed just fine with a moderate or small number of plants. Ferts can be dosed very lightly and light should be kept to a bare minimum, such as 4 hours, with very slow lengthening if algae is not a problem. Once the tank is cycled, the biofilter will serve as a backup for processing the nitrogen cycle if the tank is heavily planted, or it will be the main processor if the tank is lightly planted.

~~waterdrop~~