Plants and Fishless Cycling

You should wait because the plants will take the ammonia in, therefore make itharder to do you cycle.

Most heavily to modrate planted tanks do not need to be cycled at all,. I have started several without cycling and without fish loss. the procedure is to plant heavily and get the plants growing well than add fish slowly, if the plants are doing well no cycle will be needed. If you are unsure about this techniqe then I would suggest make sure the tank is cycled before adding plants or turning on the lights. Adding amonia to a tank full of plants is not a very good idea, I'm pretty sure it will turn into algae soup.

I agree with odessa. I load it up with as many plants as possible. Give them a week or 2 to get established and add fish VERY slowly. The smaller the tank, the slower the addition of fish. I just set up a 10 to use as a quarantine tank. I filled it, put a bunch of filter media into the filter that I had been seasoning in a filter of one of my established tanks, and added a bunch of plants. About a week later I had a Black Angel juvenile who developed a couple of white spots which looked questionable so I removed him to the "Q" tank. By himself he's doing just fine(the white spots are gone) and he's OK in the tank which had only been "set up" for about 10 days. If I was going to give him some tank mates, I'd only add 1 or two(per week) at a time. I used Salvinia/Water Lettuce for floaters as well as the regular stem plants and bunch plants because they "eat" a lot of nutrients up quickly.
Len

Fishless cycling + plants is not suggested. Ammonia + light will give you a very nasty algae bloom, and will give you a headache. Either fishless cycle your tank first, then add plants when the cycle is complete. Or as the others have said, plant heavily with fast growing plants first, let the tank stablize for 2-3 weeks, then very slowly add your fish monitoring ammonia and nitrite levels during the fish adding process.

HTH
-Richer

well, I will agree with the conventional wisdom of either add your plants after the fishless cycle - or load up on plants and add fish slowly.

That said - I put plants in during my fishless cycle - not a ton, I would say lightly planted - and my tank cycled ok. I did experience a bit of algae near the end of the cycle which I manually cleaned off once - then once I added fish, my 2 SAEs and Bristlenose took care of the rest

But I really wouldn't recommend this after eveything I read basically after the fact