Did I just screw up?

Hey there. I’m currently on day 18 of my fishless cycle in my 29 gallon tank. For the first 18 days, I was cycling with nothing in the tank except for black sand substrate from petsmart. Couple days ago I bought some amazon swords, anubias nana petites, java fern, and s. Repens on amazon and arrived today. I took the tank water halfway and started scaping the tank with rocks, driftwood and the above plants. What I forgot to do was rinse the plants off!! Have I don’t irreparable damage here? Once again there are no fish in there yet.

 

Honestly I never wash off the plants so IME you should be fine

 

Are you washing to prevent snails?

 

No you’ll be fine

 

Prevent snails, disease etc.

 

The worst thing that might happen is you'll get some hitchhikers like bladder snails. Annoying, but not harmful.

 

You cannot really cycle the tank without having some bioload to feed the bacteria colony, have you been adding some fish food to the tank to create bioload? Plants and drift wood alone cannot do it. You've been adding chemicals? One other possibility is to cycle with some hardy fish... what type of fish you have in mind for that tank?

 

You cannot really cycle the tank without having some bioload to feed the bacteria colony, have you been adding some fish food to the tank to create bioload? Plants and drift wood alone cannot do it. One other possibility is to cycle with some hardy fish... what type of fish you have in mind for that tank?

I’ve been using Dr Tim’s ammonium chloride as my ammonia source. I’m currently in the nitrite spike portion of the cycle. Cycle has been processing 1-2 ppm ammonia in 24 hours. Nitrites are off the charts. I try to do a water change once a week to get nitrite down to legible levels. I dose ammonia around every third day. I’ve been told I just gotta wait it out to see the nitrite drop on its own.