We are just starting on our fresh water aquarium

We put the water in on the 16th of October, had it tested today and our nitrates were HIGH, like almost as high as they can be, we bought a plant to help, does anyone have any other suggestions?

Oh, i'm glad you don't have any fish in the tank yet.

If you don't have any power filters or canister filters, go and get one (Aquaclear, Whisper, penguin, emperor filters) works good, they will try to get the nirtrates down.

The number of Nitrates is too high, try to test your tap water to compare. If your tap water has high number of nitrates, you know who's to blame. The thing you can do is let the tank to cycle with no fishes in your tank for about a month to two months and do 20% water changes a week. Also make sure your tank have enough circulation (concept, the tank should circulate 6 times per hour for freshwater and 10 times per hour for salt water.) For example: 50 gallon tank should have filter that can circulate water 6 times equals 300 gallon per hour. The more circulation the water nitrates will fall down slowly. By the time you add fish, add cheapest kind of fish like neon tetras to test the water.

Plant will help but not much.

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This paragraphs below is just added many hours later.

I just found out by researching a lot in last few hours cuz i was bored.

You have high Nitrates due to dirty gravel or sand. you should have rinse them in cold water before you put the gravel/sand in. Since the gravel or sand is already in the tank, put your hand in the tank and swirl the gravel and let the filter do its job. Just be aware that SAND will choke your filters so just clean your filter repeatly every half hour until the water become clear, then do it again (swirl the sand/gravel). It will help to reduce the nitrates level and do some water change as well.