Door Prizes

The Austin Pond Society held it’s September meeting at the usual location, Zilker Botanical Garden on Monday, September 19, 2016. This time, the Society was trying something different and instead of opening the meeting with the usual meal, they held a Swap or Sell meeting. Members who had items of Pond or Garden Equipment were encouraged to bring their wares and put them on display. As some of the items were fairly large, it was decided to hold that part of the meeting outdoors on the side of the building which meant that it had to be over by 7:00 pm as it was beginning to get dark. There were some interesting items on display, a push lawn mower, an electric train set, a pond filter and lots of miscellaneous stuff like plant pots, screening material and many different types of plants and many other things too numerous to list.

Following the Swap and Sell meet in which it appears that the plants were the most popular items, the meeting moved back indoors to enjoy Pizza and Salads and deserts brought by the Members before the start of business.

The main order of business for the evening was the participation and voting for the Calendar which is a very popular event for the year. Prior to that was a brief discussion by Jeannie, the President and Nancy Reinert about the invitation to all interested members to participate in converting a Pool to Pond seminar at Nancy’s house on Saturday. It was going to be a working event with the members quite literally getting their hands dirty as they helped to clean out Nancy’s existing Pool/Pond. Hers has been set up for four years and was in need of a plant clean-out and replacement and would show the interested  members just what it takes to make the conversion. You can read about that event at this link.Cleaning the Pool/Pond Conversion

The next order of business was given by Laura who outlined the vacancies on the Board and at the same time went around the room asking for volunteers. As with most small organizations, it is usually the same people that run the show and we are desperately looking for some new blood. The elections will be held at the October meeting. This meeting was looking for nominations. Following this, was the drawing for the door prizes.

The final event of the evening was the announcement of the different winners for the Calendar in which members had voted earlier in the evening. Their were four categories,
1) Ponds and pond features
2) Fish
3) Wildlife (“any insects, amphibians, birds, critters, etc. found around or in our ponds,” except fish)
4) Pond Plants
with a first, second and third place winners and the one with the most votes goes on the front page. This is always a popular event and there were some truly amazing pictures.

This was the final event of the evening and all that remained was for the members who had brought items which had not been sold having to re-load them into their cars to take them home. All in all, another popular meeting with about 45 members enjoying good company and good food.

As with all of these pictures, if you click on one it will enlarge and you can use the side arrows to move along. Use the “Escape” key to get back to normal.
Below is the video of the inside events.

APS September Meeting 2016 from Francis Allcorn on Vimeo.