"Racf" wrote in message link.net...
...It seems I read a lot more about adding plants these days
as a cycle solution. To me its interesting advice as I really do not
really see how that's going to cycle anything...

You are correct, adding plants does not "cycle" anything. Rather, it
prevents the cycle.

The cycle occurs because NH4 builds up faster than bacteria reproduce
to process it. As those bacteria grow, NO2 builds up faster than
bacteria reproduce.

But plants consume NH4. In fact, they prefer NH4 to NO3. (Studies have
shown that many plants don't even produce the enzyme "nitrate
reductase" in the presence of NH4, meaning that they won't process NO3
when there's NH4 to be had.) So if you add enough plants, you don't
need that bacterial population.

So is my tank cycled? No. I'm quite sure that if I pulled out all my
plants today, I'd have terrible NH4 and NO2 spikes before things
settled down.

Now, is my tank stable? Yes. It was stable from the day I set it up,
insofar as NH4 and NO2 were, and still are, undetectable.

For me, having a stable tank is a lot more important than having a
cycled tank. :-)