[APD] new directions or the final frontier

[Tony Eales <s328962 at student_uq.edu.au>]

I've been participating in a discussion about new v old ideas about 
fertilization on the aquabotanic boards and it got me to thinking. Any 
cursory look through through the archives of the APD and you will see a lot 
of posts about plant species. Sure most were about species X won't grow and 
the advice seemed to consist of "I find a pinch of mandrake root, 
undergravel heating cables and dancing around the mistle-toe naked once a 
month essential to grow this plant." but it lead to many interesting 
discussions of said cables, substrates, CO2 water additives and parameters. 
These days most of the regulars have growing plants nailed and if Tom is 
right and (heaven forefend) he writes that book any monkey with a bag of 
flourite, a bottle of CO2, a box of ferts and decent lights will be able to 
grow anything.

Question is what will happen then? Will the list turn into endless 
recommendations for valves, light bulbs and hood designs. Personally I'd 
rather pull out my fingernails for fun. Certainly this new stuff about 
marine plants is exciting but that can't be the only thing on the horizon. 
Would it be too much to hope that we will once again become interested in 
the weeds that fill up the space between our equipment. Maybe now that we 
can grow them we might start to take a closer look at them. Where are they 
from? How do they reproduce? What other ones are there and can we go out 
and collect them? Basically the kind of stuff fish people talk about now 
that they know how to keep them alive.

What do you think?

_______________________________________________
Aquatic-Plants mailing list
Aquatic-Plants at actwin_com
http://www.actwin.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/aquatic-plants