Transcribeme Audio Answers August 2019
Audio Answer
And this is something we like to ask all of our interviewees because it's always interesting to us and to our listeners to hear how everybody started in the hobby so tell us a little bit about how you first started out with aquariums.
That's a great question. It was as a child, I must have been 8 or 10, my mom had a fish pond, I started keeping live bearers. I think I started out maybe with mosquito fish which I used to catch in the canals and this was in California and I had a little 2 gallon bowl and kept swordtails, mollies and guppies at one time or another. I remember being absolutely fascinated when they gave birth and all those little swordtale babies bright red and then when the black mollies had babies the little black babies I just couldn't get enough.
That is a neat experience.
I started out with libraries as well and I remember the same fascination with the little babies.
I remember watching them pop out of the mother it was I was just absolutely entranced pretty magical magical is right so did you keep on with aquariums up to now more or less or there were some interruptions when I was in college but I kept coming back to them at one time these Guppies that I had they had a horrible disease that I couldn't get rid of and I remember being out of the hobby for many years because of that and then I started back up in 1987 with the the planted tanks but I've had tanks off and on all of my life and I guess this is a good lead into our next question what led you to develop your method or what is widely known as the wall stead method well I'll go back to my childhood here I live next to a dairy farm and they had a big stock tank in the yard with the cows and it was filled with Vallisnaria this stock tank you know was big hundred gallon tank was out in full Sun the substrate was probably manure from the cows the cows cow but the the plants in there the valeton area it was like a forest they were bright green emerald green there was no algae in there they were growing like crazy it was just a beautiful sight out in the middle of this feedlot so that kind of gave me you know something that I always return to when I was having trouble growing plants later on as an aquarium hobbyist for a long time I tried to grow plants an aquarium and I did what everybody recommended you know put gravel in and get your plants and I failed all the time it just never worked and so when I got back into the hobby in 1987 this was after my sister died and needed something to divert my attention to I decided that I would just do something really different and I kept that idea of the stock tank with the beautiful growth of Allison area in my mind and I thought well none of the aquarium methods have worked why don't I just do what I would I knew but what I had seen before so I set up a 20-gallon in front of the window with sunlight and then I just put swirl in the bottom and I couldn't believe that the plants just grew like crazy I'd never seen plants grow like that in an aquarium and that's kind of how it all started oh so in this first attempt of the method you didn't have any gravel over the soil or anything yes yes I did have gravel over the soil okay yeah yes absolutely okay and it's very cool so everything came from and it's pretty amazing that the first attempt at the method worked right off I got lucky it was like night and day from what I had remembered in my earlier failures it was you know once you see plants really growing it was it was just spectacular yeah cool so that was it and it was just a game changer yeah I can imagine yeah that's the fascinating story that the method was inspired by it as the stock I'd never heard about it yes you're the first one to hear this see we've got the exclusive scoop have you heard yeah yeah Wow so that leads us to our next one too doesn't yeah tell us how the wall stead method compares with the high light co2 injection planted aquarium all right well it's just such a big difference I mean I'm working with Mother Nature where is those methods they're very expensive to set up they're hard tomaintain they require a lot of work because you're not you're working kind of working against mother nature you're removing nutrients with a whole bunch of water changes and excessive filtration and then because there aren't any nutrients there you have to put them all back using gadgets artificial fertilization co2 injection and my method it the nutrients in the tank and let's the plants have them and that keeps the the fish healthy and it's just a completely different method and very cool you could almost call it the organic aquarium a very good term thank you yes that's it it's the organic aquarium you know I mean the soil is a tremendous supply of carbon dioxide.
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