and this is something we like to ask all 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 mum had a fish pond. I started by
keeping livebearers, I think I started out maybe with mosquitofish, which I used to catch in the canals.
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
swordtail 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 livebearers as well and I remember the same fascination with the little babies.

Yeah. I remember watching them pop out of the mother. It was just-- I was just absolutely entranced.

So did you keep on with aquariums up to now, more or less?

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. But I kept coming back to them. And
then I started back up in 1987 with the planted tanks, but I've had tanks off and on all of my life.

And I guess this is a good lead in to our next question. What led you to develop your method or what is
widely known as the Walstad method?

Well, I'll go back to my childhood here. I lived next to a dairy farm and they had a big stock tank in the
yard with the cows and it was filled with Vallisneria. This stock tank was out in full sun, the substrate was
probably manure from the cows. But the plants in there- the Vallisneria, it was like a forest. They were
bright 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 something that I always return to when I
was having trouble growing plants later on as an aquarium hobbyist. I tried to grow plants in aquariums
and I did what everybody recommended, put gravel in and get your plants. It just never worked. So
when I got back into the hobby in 1987, I decided that I would just do something really different and I
kept that idea of the stock tank with the beautiful growth of Vallisneria in my mind. And I thought well,
none of the aquarium methods have worked, why don't I just do what I had seen before. So I set up a 20
gallon in front of the window with sunlight and then I just put soil in the bottom. 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. It was like night and day from what I had remembered in my earlier failures. Once you
see plants really growing, it was just spectacular.

I can imagine, yeah. That's the fascinating story that the method was inspired by the stock tank. I'd
never heard of that.

And my method, it leaves the nutrients in the tank and lets the plants have them. And that keeps the
fish healthy and it's just a completely different method.

You can almost call it the organic aquarium.

A very good term! That's it, it's the organic aquarium. I mean the soil is a tremendous supply of carbon
dioxide