GWAPA July Meeting – Luis Navarro
July 27th, 2008
On Saturday, GWAPA brought Luis Navarro all the way from Houston, TX to do an aquascaping demonstration at our monthly club meeting. I was fortunate to have some time to hang out with him on Friday evening after picking him up from the airport. He’s a really talented and knowledgable aquascaper, so just to talk plants with him was an honor. Prior to the start of the meeting, a few of us gathered at Francine’s house to prepare the 125G aquarium that Luis was going to aquascape. We also had to get the plants he wanted to use ready, which involved tying anubias to small rocks, breaking up Marsilea minuta into small plugs for easy planting, and such.
Around 1:00pm, members started arriving, and by 2:00pm we had almost 30 people packed into Francine’s basement. Everyone was very interested to watch Luis work. He answered a number of questions, and proceed with the aquascape. After about an hour, he had completed this rock scape using Marsilea minuta, Anubias barteri var. ‘nana’, Cryptocoryne crispatula var. balansae, and Vallisneria nana.
Francine's 125G, Scaped by Luis Navarro.
After the demonstration, we held our auction, which consisted of nearly 100 bags of plants for sale. I came away with a number of items this month, including Rotala verticillatus, Rotala sp. ‘Green Narrow,’ Nuphar japonica, Potamogeton gayi, an assortment of other plants. I also was happy to have some other plants on my doorstep when I got home, including Juncus repens, Limnophila sp. “mini”, Hygrophila difformis “variegated”, and Hemigraphis traian. I barely had room for all of that stuff in my tanks! Thanks GWAPA for another great meeting!
July 28th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
You are so fortunate to have a great group to belong to. I can’t believe he did that in an hour! I bet my pleco can rearrange it all for him in about 10 minutes if he’d like:) (grumbles about her pleco doing his own aquascaping every-single-night).
July 28th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
We are very fortunate to have so many clubs in our area. To be fair, it took more than an hour. I didn’t count the 2 hours of prep work we did prepping the plants, adding the substrate, and creating the hardscape. It took an hour for him to plant the plants (with help for the foreground), and give his talk. My general rule-of-thumb for rescaping one of my tanks is 4-5 hours from break down of the old aquascape to completion of the new one. I hear you about the pleco — I’ve long ago traded in all of my large unwieldy fish. 😉