Plant foods whilst cycling?

[Eleonora]

Since there's no waste from fish to act as a fertiliser, will the plants die? Should I be adding fertiliser? Will the plants last 2 weeks before I put fish in?

 

[noop]

to cycle a tank you need to be adding ammonia, which will allow the bacteria to grow. if you're doing it fishlessly, you need to supply the ammonia artificially

i'm not sure what plants need to eat, but i think it's nitrates rather than ammonia or nitrites. so - if i'm right - the plants will have nothing to eat until the cycle is almost complete

but you need a source of ammonia or nothing will happen (except your plants will suffer)

 

[Eleonora]

I did use some filter material from an existing tank, plus swapped some of the ceramic tubes for used one from the tank also. Is this enough to start the cycle going?

 

[noop]

using the filter material will have put some bacteria in your tank, but these bacteria will die off without ammonia to eat

i was intending to do a fishless cycle, so i tried looking for pure (or water-diluted) ammonia in every shop in sydney, but without success. so i settled for doing a fishy cycle instead

 

[Eleonora]

So what fish should I put in there that would be able to handle the chem spikes of a cycling tank?

 

[Phantom Thief]

Zebra Danios or White Cloud Mountain Minnows. I'm using zebra danios to cycle my 65g.

P.T.

 

[noop]

the 'usual' cycling fish are zebra danios and/or guppies. they're both quite hardy. i did lots of water changes during my cycle to try to make things as easy as possible on them. i lost some danios but that wasn't due to the cycling...

also i used stress-zyme to help speed the process up