I have my own way of doing a planted tank and a fishless cycle. I find it works out for the fastest stocking and healthy plants.
1. Determine your aquascaping plan- i.e . decide what is going where in the tank, especially plants.
2. Set up and plant the tank fully.
3. Since most plants come with fertilizer reserves, you should not need to fertilize much initially. CO2 is more important at this stage. The point here is to give the plants time to settle in and to establish roots. I usually want at least 2 weeks for this.
4. After settling the plants in, the only question is how much ammonia can the tank process in 24 hours or less. Bear in mind the plants arrive with some amount of the desired bacteria living on them.
5. To answer the question you need a controlled dose of ammonia. Using food is an uncontrolled and messy way to do a fishless cycle is not recommended. Use either ammonium chloride or ammonia. Dosing must be precise. There are ammonia calculators online to help with dosing.
6. Start by adding 1 ppm of ammonia and test ammonia in 12 hours. if you have an ammonia reading after 12 hours, test again in 24 hours. If there is none after either 12 or 24 hours, repeat the dose with 2 ppm. Retest at 12 and 24 hours. If you test 0 ammonia at either interval, you are good to add a full load of fish. Do not over stock.
7. If after adding the 2 ppm and you hit 24 hours and there is still not 0 ammonia, test again in another 24 hours. Repeat testing until you get 0, then re-add 2 ppm. The goal is for the tank to turn 2 ppm of ammonia to 0 in 24 hours max.
If you are willing to stock more slowly than a full stock all at once, then if you can process 1 ppm in 24 hours you can do roughly a 50% stocking to start. Bear in mind that what determines stocking levels in the mass of the fish. More and or bigger fish make more ammonia. Once that 50% fish load is settlled in and readings are all good, you can add 25% wait a bit and then add the final 25%. testing will tell you when adding is safe.
Doing a full fishless cycle and then adding plants is a slwoer way to do things and it wastes time and effort. The bacteria present in an unplanted tank handles all the ammonia, When plants are present they begin using the ammonia (as ammonium). So there will be less bacteria the more plants one has. However, no planted tank is completely devoid of nitrifying bacteria. On the other hand a tank with no plants can still process a lot of ammonia having only bacteria. Plants allow one to stock sooner and take less time than a plantless fishless cylcle which take 4-6 weeks.