MyMonkey said:
Just to make sure I am doing this right. I am cycling a 7 gallon planted tank right now. I have cycled SW and reef tanks in the past by adding a large shrimp and letting the cycle proceed. Takes about 20 to 30 days and poof: Cycled tank.
I have done the same thing with the 7 gallon planted. Small piece of shrimp. Amonia has risen to .25 and should begin to go down while nitrite then nitrates go up. Lots of plants in the little tank so I don't think the amonia will make it much over the .25. Not sure though.
Is that an old school method of cycling or still ok?
Check out the Cycling options thread farther on down the page. It has a lot of discussion about cycling but here's a quick recap (IMO of course):
You are risking an algae outbreak in your tank by keeping the rotting shrimp in the tank. 99.999% of the time an algae outbreak is caused by free ammonia in the water (from a fish death, killing your filter, neglecting water changes that prevent the plants from using the ammonia, etc.). Algae need light. When the lights are on in the tank you don't want to be able to detect ammonia. This obviously creates a problem when you have plants....
You should only use the rotting shrimp with a fishless cycle (done with the lights off). If you are cycling with plants, you want to keep the ammonia levels very low (this is normally done with a small number of fish, but I guess you could dose an ammonia source in the morning and at night in a very small amount). This is referred to as a silent cycle and if done properly should work as planned (no algae, cycle completes with no fish death or harm). The reason why this works is that such a small amount of ammonia is being produced that you never detect it with a test kit. The plants use up the available ammonia, and the bacteria slowly become established. And the algae don't have the nitrogen source in large amounts to cause problems.
This can go badly when using live fish (or even without due to algae), however, since for a good portion of time the plants are your ammonia sponge. If something happens and the plants start to die, you will double your problems as the plants will start to ADD ammonia rather than remove it.
If I were you I would do 1 of 2 things:
-return the plants or move them out of the tank (do you have another FW tank or a friends you could temporarily place them?) and do a traditional fishless cycle (see articles section for directions)
-keep the tank as is now but remove the shrimp. You can keep the shrimp in a small covered bowl of water (say in the fridge and away from light) and use this shrimp "juice" to dose your tank with ammonia. This way you can monitor and more importantly CONTROL the amount of free ammonia in the water. If done properly you might not see an algae outbreak. Even better, add the ammonia at NIGHT when the lights turn off. This will give your bacteria 1st dibs at the ammonia, and the left over will be used by the plants when the light comes back on.
So your method is OK, it just needs to be tweaked. But I'm personally very pleased to see you are doing this without fish.
HTH
Just kidding... 
