There are a number of articles and comments
in forums that refer to using living plants
to help cycle a new tank. To set up my new
55G, I relied heavily on Chuck Gadd's article:
http://www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua/art_plant_newtank.htm

I departed from his steps in two ways:
1) I don't do CO2 injection. Instead I used daily
doses of Flourish Excel. And I didn't exactly
overdose the tank, but I did use larger doses than
recommended on occasion. My plants are low
light, easy care plants, nothing that absolutely
requires CO2 injection.

2) I didn't add fish until most of my plants were
in place and the tank had been running for almost a
month, and I didn't start with only algae eaters. In
the first batch of fish I added one Oto plus three
Cory cats and two Glowlight tetras (plus the four
teensy fry that came into the new tank on some
plants). The second batch of fish, added a day later
included two Neon tetras and two more Cory cats.

I still have more stem plants to add, but then I'll be
able to remove some of the floaters to keep them
from blocking light to the lower levels. I.e., the
plant biomass will stay approximately the same.

I haven't seen any algae in the tank that I didn't
bring in from an existing tank (i.e., several Java
Fern leaves have some algae on them), and there
has been no bacterial bloom, but then yesterday
was only my second day of adding fish. I'll wait
a week and monitor water parameters daily before
adding more fish.

I'm aware that cycling is a controversial topic,
but the system I used based on Chuck Gadd's
article appeared to work just fine. I used a
very similar method several years ago when
setting up a new 20G Long tank, with no
problems - and it has the heaviest plant growth
of all my tanks.

In doing research for this post, I learned a new
term: "silent cycling", which is what some people
are using to refer to cycling with plants.

I think I've exhausted anything I have to say on
this subject. I'm going to enjoy my new 55G
and its plants, driftwood and fish.

Gail