First- did you outgass your tap water before you tested it for pH? If not you need to retest after doing 1 of 2 things. Let a clean glass of water sit out over night beofre testing or else use and air pump to bubble the water in the glass for about 15 minutes and then test it. You are trying to outgas any excess CO2.
The fishless cycling article here is meant for tanks that contain no or almost no live plants. The more plants one starts out with, the less useful the guide becomes.
Here is why. Live plants use ammonium. They do this way faster than the bacteria can use NH3. So, the more plants one has in any given tank, the less bacteria there will be. However, there will never be no bacteria no matter how many plants one has.
Basically what you are doing is feeding the plants not establishing large bacterial colonies.
Sodium Bicarbonate -
from
https://fins.actwin.com/aquariafaq.html
I really need to write the next article re cycling which deals with planted tanks and seeding bacteria to jump start the cycle. Both of these things alter how one should approach insuring that a tank is not in danger of harming fish due to ammonia. When it comes to plants and cycling, there is no way to reduce things to a basic formula the way it can be done when no plants are involved. The reason is due to the great variety of potential plants one can have combined with different planting levels.
Basically. if your tank can clear 2 ppm of ammonia in 24 hous or less, you can pretty much stock the tank. If your tank can clear 1 ppm of ammonia in 24 hours, you can stock it in three additions. Start with 40%. If/when you run a week with no ammonia, add another 25%. If you run another week with no ammonia, add the rest. These %s are in terms of the bio-load the fish produce and notthe number of fish. The bigger a fish, the more ammonia it makes.
