Ah Ally, you have toucherd the raw nerve of this forum: to compost bread or not to compost bread. There are two schools of thought. Well, really two schools and one offshoot. 1. The annpat school of composting which says never compost bread. This is not so much because bread is bad in the compost but because annpat has a very active imagination and can't stand the thought of soggy bread. Her one exception is noodles. The logic behind this is because "it is the noodle's nature" to be wet and soggy. 2. The berryman school of composting which says compost every type of bread you can find. Even donuts and brownies with frosting. And taunt annpat at every opportunity. Brag about the rich, black, bread enriched compost you are getting and even arrange bread crust greetings to annpat on top of said compost. 3. The final school is the one I follow. (annpat, stop reading now) Compost it, but don't taunt annpat about it.

There are lots of good low-growing ground-covers. The one most commonly used in terrariums is Ficus pumila. There is an all-green version and a variegated version. Be warned that it does grow very quickly and needs regular trimming back to keep it in bounds, but the leaves are small and well-suited to the smaller environment of a terrarium. There are also small-leaved ivies, but all english ivies prefer to be grown cooler (terrariums can get rather warm), and they will also take over your terrarium. And though I have no experience with Ficus pumila, I would think that English ivy would be more difficult to get rid of, since it would form woody stems that would be harder to cut, and it's roots can be very extensive. It could also revert to a larger-leaved form, and then you'd really be up the creek without a paddle! There is also Ficus quercifolia, which looks like a very tiny ivy, but is not anywhere near as aggressive as F. pumila. You can buy it from Rob's. I've linked them below. I absolutely love it, and will be ordering some from them next summer. I have seen it in a paludarium in a fish store here, and it really is not aggressive. It actually grows kind of slowly, but it is just the cutest thing, and I love it! You could also use selaginella as a ground cover. Looks more like moss than a vine, but does the job nicely! You can use collected moss, but we are not yet sure if it requires that dormancy. I am currently testing that in my terrarium(s), so we'll have the answer in a couple years. =) I think it would survive for at least a year, so if you want the temporary effect, and would later replace it with some cushion moss or java moss or other good tropical moss, then go ahead. Just don't harvest sphagnum moss from the wild, as it is being over-harvested, and make sure you rinse the moss in RO water and check it for slugs. I imported springtails into my terrarium when I put in some live moss from the forest, but they don't do any damage to plants. Slugs would eat your entire terrarium and would be impossible to get rid of without starting over again, so you want to make sure you don't have any of them! You could just leave the moss soaking in RO water for an hour or two. This would drown any slugs present. And I have found that spring is the best time to collect moss. It grows faster and settles in better, for some reason. And I mean very early spring, when if you go for a walk in the forest, the only green you can see is patches of moss. No grass is growing yet, and no leaves are on the trees and shrubs. A shortage of cork, eh? That seems odd. I thought it was cultivated. Maybe it's been over-harvested since those cork floor tiles became so popular this year! Here is a link that might be useful: Rob's mini plants

taw9370: We have also purchased Stepco brand bamboo flooring from FastFloors. I'll start by noting that they screwed up our order a bit; the salesperson incorrectly described the trim accessories available, and the 'end-cap' or 'threshold' trim was overlap style - like you would use for a floating install - rather than the integral tongue-n-groove style we wanted. The reducer on the other hand _was_ integral with the flooring, so either Stepco doesn't describe it very well, or the salesperson just didn't check hard enough. However, we have been very happy with FastFloors' customer service post-screwup. They haven't seemed to dodge our calls and respond to both phone and email queries quickly. They agreed to send out additional reducer (which our installer agrees could be modified to our needs) to replace the end-cap trim (which they told us to just keep because it wasn't worth it to them to pay to ship it back), and it fedexed out the next day. Of course, FedEx somehow managed to lose it and didn't tell anyone till they missed their scheduled delivery date :-(. Our tracking number showed it as 'on time for delivery' on the specified day until it missed then it just showed nothing. Bad FedEx >:-(. However, a quick call to FastFloors, and they're sending us another replacement, no problems at all. Due to the multiple snafus we're pushing the time envelope for getting everything together (contractor supposed to start this week), but we're pretty happy with the FastFlors service so far. As to the Stepco product itself, we're getting the carbonized/carmelized strand woven 'Dimensions' engineered floor for a glue-down install on concrete. This product is a 3-layer engineered floor where the bottom two layers are perpendicularly laid (middle layer 90 degrees from top or bottom layers) horizontal bamboo, and the top wear layer (nice & thick too) is strand woven. We hated every horizontal and vertical bamboo sample we got from any manufacturer because they all lacked the advertized "twice as hard as oak or maple!!!!!!1!one" hardness. Very soft in our stress testing - dropping keys, dropping knives, dropping pieces of brio track, turning upside down and standing on them and using as skates on our tile floors (I weigh too much, not gonna tell exactly), gouging with a nail punch.... etc :-). I wouldn't recommend horizontal or vertical grained bamboo to anyone. I highly recommend the strand woven bamboo however. That stuff is ****ing DENSE and hard as hell. Pretty good water resistance too since it's pretty much all glue - we soaked one sample half in and half out of a bucket of water for about 24 hours and couldn't tell which half was which. WAY harder than the other samples we got (including actual oak and maple samples, which were about on par with the better quality horizontal/vertical bamboo for dentability), and reasonably priced. So long story short, we found that Stepco was introducing this engineered bamboo with a strand woven top, and it sounded ideal since it combined the durability of a strand woven top with the added stability of engineered construction. Plus it was on sale (online things are always on sale one way or the other), and we got free shipping of our 1300 sq ft (saved another ~$600 there). We haven't installed yet (like I mentioned, starting this week though), but I'll be keeping my eye out for the rough edges taw9370 mentioned. We unpacked the first couple layers of one box and they looked good on the top edges (the strand woven layer), though I probably could have gotten a splinter off of one of the bottom edges (the horizontal bamboo layer) if I tried. I'm not worried too much at this point as I wouldn't expect the bottom to be as finely finished as the top bevel anyway, though it always gives me a little heart atack when someone says a product is bad after I already bought it :-). This is actually my first post, though i've been reading for a long time - I just finished a full DIY kitchen remodel including wall/ceiling/cabinet/electrical/counter/appliance removal with lots of reinforcement from the posts on this form. I plan to make a web page with pics of the process and end result when I'm done (ha ha ha ha... seriously. HA HA HA HA - we all know I'll never be completely done) and will try to remember to share. What I learned from the experience: 1) Ikea cabinets rawk! 2) Whoever thought 7' kitchen ceilings were a good idea (early 80's) should be shot. 3) Removing a (non-load-bearing) wall is easy and fun 4) Whoever invented that simple drywall jack: I love you and want to have your babies. Pfennig PS: If anyone in the Austin area is looking for a good installer, I highly reccomend floorguy. We had three contractors come out to quote our install job (I didn't want to screw that one up, and I'd get glue everywhere for sure), and we preferred floorguy over the other two by a large margin. We didn't use him because the price difference between him and the middle-price contractor was a bit over the premium we decided we'd be willing to pay for him, but we'd still highly recommend getting him to come out if you're in the area. We'll let any interested parties know if we'd also recommend the installer we _did_ go with after our install is done :-).

What age do you feel like? ~59, but I "think" 30 and feel 80. LOL! Do you eat breakfast everyday? ~Currently, I am doing Protein Smoothies for Breakfast. Would you consider yourself "wierd" or "crazy"? ~Well...I have a bumper sticker that says "Why be Normal?". What's the best time of the year (for you)? ~I love March right through to November. Any days under 50's, I'll be in my Cave. Have a great day!!! You too~ Right now it is in 70's and loving it even with the humidity.