February 2015 Meeting

Saturday, March 7th, 2015 at 12:03 am

The February meeting for GWAPA that was scheduled for the 21st was delayed until Sunday due to a snow storm that hit hard on the meeting day. The meeting was held at the home of Nick Kinser in Sterling VA and the guest speaker was Sam Sankar. Despite the cold and deep snow piles on the street, turnout was decent with 12 members in attendance, 2 of which had just joined that day. Sam Sankar gave a wonderful talk titled “Planted Tanks for Beginners”.


More about our guest speaker’s talk.
Sam had kept aquariums for many years as child but then took a long break. He didn’t get back into the hobby until he decided to get a tank for his son which quickly became his own pet project. though he had kept tanks in the past he had never kept a planted tank. After coming across some pictures online of various Dutch and Amano style tanks he decided that he had to try it.
He started small with a standard tank and found that he was able to grow plants. After attending a GWAPA meeting and seeing a beautiful rimless tank by another member he decided to move on to a rimless tank and high tech system. Sam got a rimless tank and built his own custom stand and hood for the tank. He also built an impressive led light and drilled the bottom of the tank in order to hide all the in tank equipment. Sam wanted to make things easy on himself so he even went as far as to plumb his tank into his home system in order to make water changes a snap.
From what he learned he offered the following advice to people wishing to start a planted aquarium. Skip the complex hardscape at first and just grow plants. Start with easy plants such as water sprite, rotala, ludwigia, cambomba and cryptocoryne spp. Don’t worry about more difficult species and foreground plants at first. He also suggests to plant densely and not to be too concerned with appearance at first, just grow plants. Be patient and give it time. It may not look great at first but once things are growing the healthy plant growth is beautiful on its own.
After the talk we had our regular monthly auction. Though it wasn’t a very large auction there were some nice plants that sold.
As always we would like to encourage people to attend the meetings, they are always fun and there is always something to learn.

 

Below are some pictures of our host’s tanks. Please enjoy.