HAP

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

I'll weigh in as well.  What I told this person was that in our local 
seattle club we had certain requirements to become a "master 
horticulturist" that went beyond merely racking up lots of species points.  
You have to propagate something by seed.  The plants are broken out by 
"difficulty class", and you have to have a certain amount from "class C 
and D".  Something else, which Kathy reminded me of later, is that you 
also need to have presented a program on aquatic plants.  Given those 
criteria, I skyrocketed to Master Horticulturist in under 2 years in my 
local club.  And I didn't even care about it; i just happened to look for 
every new species of plant when I made my then-weekly jaunts to the fish 
store, and proceeded to propagate it.

Anyway, the other thing I brought up was similar to what Karen said: a 
nice CO2 delivery system is not like juicing fish, it's more like having 
an automated daphnia feeder hooked up to the tanks. 

I do think, however, that many clubs' HAP programs really need to be 
re-evaluated, given that they were written in the early 80's when folks 
knew a heck of a lot less about plants.  A lot of the species classified 
as "really hard" aren't.

My 2 cents. 

  - Erik

---
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com