liz - The pond itself is shaped like a kidney bean and the pond liner is square. So when I laid out the liner I adjusted the extra liner to come out on the corner of the pond where I intended to put the waterfall. The waterfall itself is backed by the extra liner with the end of it tucked into the top of the cement blocks. I was lucky in finding a rock with a lip to cover the ends of the hoses that feed the water fall. It did take me a couple of weeks to adjust the liner to stop leaks but now it is virtually leak free. I am really glad I didn't cement the rocks together because since this post I have had to take it apart 2 times to correct problems. Hopefully, I won't have to a third time! nova

If you're seeing cabbage root fly maggots now, I am really surprised because they are cool-season pests, and Oklahoma is hot, hot, hot right now. I've gardened in Texas (80 miles south of where I garden now in Oklahoma) and Oklahoma all my life and never seen a cabbage root fly either in the maggot form or the fly form. Leaf hoppers are everywhere every year. I just ignore them. Aphids are most abundant on plants fed heavily with nitrogen or in new beds heavily enriched with nitrogen. I believe the reason is that extra fertilizer creates extra carbs and the insects find the extra carbs to be especially attractive. Some years the aphids are worse than others. People here tell me it is a bad aphid year, but other than seeing a few on my cabbage and broccoli a month or two ago, I'm not seeing them. Just use a sharp spray of water from the hose to wash them off the back of the leaves. Do this once or twice a day and they'll get tired of it and leave. If they are driving you nuts, you can try spraying the backs of the leaves with either a commercial (not home-made) insecticidal soap or neem oil. I don't do either unless they are incredibly heavy and the water spray doesn't dislodge them. Tiny hoppers. Yes, they most likely are just the younger instars of the grasshoppers. In my garden, the tiny ones show up in March and April and occasionally are still hatching out in May. I put out Semaspore weekly while the hoppers are small and after that I generally do nothing unless the infestation is extremely high, which it is this year. Semaspore and other products with the same active ingredient generally are not effective on the larger instars and it is expensive, so using it after they've gotten bigger than 1/4" to 1/2" would be a waste of money. I'm going to link a document about grasshopper control. The problem with any method of grasshopper control is that new hoppers migrate in every week....if not every day, so no matter what you do, more of them just keep coming. This year I bought EcoBran and am ready to use it. If I use it, it will be the first chemical pesticide I've used in well over a decade, but last year the hoppers destroyed certain crops, and I think they already are present in heavier numbers now than they were at this time last year. They're probably my biggest garden problem in the years when their population peaks. They're not a big problem every year. In our garden, the grasshoppers usually attack these plants in this specific order every year: lemon balm, catnip, catmint, potatoes, mint, basil, beans, peas. In the worst years they then move to to tomatoes and peppers. This year, they're already damaging the tomato and pepper plants, which they usually don't do until July or August here. I ignore root maggots. There's always one here and there, but they aren't present in large enough numbers to cause significant damage. In my garden, there are probably thousands of bugs present on any given day. I don't worry about 99.9% of them. Your garden, just like the world at large, is an ecosystem. You'll always have bugs. The alternative is to nuke your garden with such heavy dosages of chemical pesticides that everything in your garden becomes heavily contaminated with chemicals. I just won't do it. I'd give up my garden before I began spraying broad-spectrum pesticides. There are very few pests in your garden that will do enough damage to become a problem for home gardeners, so I mostly ignore them. With the pests that are troublesome, I prefer to hand-pick and destroy them and their eggs above all other methods because then I'm hurting only the pest insects and not the beneficial insects. The worst thing anyone can do is spray their garden with a broad-spectrum pesticide that wipes out the good bugs that help keep the bag bugs under control. Learn to tolerate a healthy bug population. Then, when your child or grandchild, a niece or nephew, or the child of a friend or neighbor is working on their Insect Collection for school, you'll be the most popular person in town. When our son and our friends' children were at the 'insect collection' age in school, my garden (and our screened-in back porch) were the most popular places in town. A kid could drop by, spend an hour or so, and pick up 25-50 different kinds of insects for their collection. After a while, I could pretty much identify them on sight for the kids and could refer them to the best websites for ID and proper scientific names and such. It can be amazingly difficult for a 'city kid' in an area with heavy pesticide use to find enough insects for their insect collection, but in our yard and garden they found tons. Floating row cover is a godsend. I have 5,000 square feet of it but don't use it for much in terms of excluding insects. It is great for excluding squash pests. Otherwise I mostly use it for freeze/frost protection where it saved my garden a couple of times this year from late freezes. For pests of the brassica family, buy and use Bt 'Kurstaki'. It works only on caterpillar type pests and is not toxic to others. Do be sure you avoid putting it on flowers to which butterflies and moths would be attracted because it has the potential to kill them. Generally for brassica family crops like cabbage loopers and imported cabbage worms, I just handpick them off the plants (wear disposable latex or nitrile gloves if you don't want to touch them) and drop them into a cup or bucket. Then I take them to the chicken coop and toss them in there for the poultry to devour. As an alternative you can drop them into a bowl of soapy water and drown them, or drop them on the ground and squish them with your foot. If you check the backs of the leaves for them and remove them (and their eggs) while they are small, you can eliminate them. However, you have to remain vigilant because there's always more of them coming. This year they haven't been nearly as bad as they were last year. Accept that your garden and yard are an ecosystem and you'll always have insects, both good and bad. Avoid panic when you see them. It is not often that pest populations are high enough to create a significant issue. For each pest that is a problem, use integrated pest management. Use narrow-spectrum solutions aimed at that specific pest. Try to avoid doing anything that will hurt your beneficial insects and they'll help keep the pest insects under control. Just about every year I have one pest or the other that is more of a problem in that specific year than it normally is. Last year it was grasshoppers and Colorado Potato Beetles. This year we had relatively few CPBs but hoppers are bad again this year. This is not unusual as grasshopper populations cycle up and down. Once they peak (last year was, I hope, their peak, although this year could be), their population slowly cycles back down after several years. I just do not get very excited about most insects. Our world is an ecosystem and they are a part of it. When they are doing damage, I do what I can to control them to the best of ability, and then I just don't get too wound up over them above and beyond that. They aren't worth getting upset over, spending vast sums of money to combat (you'll never get rid of them all, and if you did, more would move in) or fretting over. The pests I think worth spending time and money to combat (if their numbers warrant) is very small and would include these: cabbage loopers and cabbage worms Colorado potato beetles squash bugs and squash vine borers grasshoppers blister beetles and leaf-footed bugs I don't get too excited over tomato and tobacco hornworms because they seldom do much damage at all to my plants. I don't worry much about corn earworms or Eurpoean corn borers because they can be cut out of the ears of corn after it is harvested. I ignore leaf miners and flea beetles as they rarely do enough harm to any of my plants to actually hurt them. I let lady bugs take care of the bugs they like to eat. Other beneficial insects eat other pesty things. Birds, frogs, toads, and other reptiles and amphibians take care of lots of the insects. We have a young male kitten who has made it his mission in life to play with and kill every grasshopper he sees. Let's use Colorado Potato Beetles as an example of a pest that may or may not be a problem in a given year. A few showed up this year but not all that many. I handpicked maybe 30 or 40 over a 3-month period. As soon as the Assasin bugs showed up, I stopped handpicking them and let the Assasin bugs take care of them. However, last year they were a huge problem and we had hundreds and hundreds of them. We have 14.5 acres and every one of them is just crawling with bugs. On the approximate 12.5 acres that we don't even mow, are the insects doing significant harm to the plants? Nope. So, why knock myself out worrying about them on the 2 acres where we have our lawn, garden and other landscaping? I don't. I simply try to control the ones that I know from experience will damage a crop enough that I won't get a harvest from it. Most insects have a purpose in life and I try not to interfere with it. For example, I am not at all fond of blister beetles. However, they do eat grasshopper eggs. So, even though my initial inclination is to kill one when I see it eating a tomato plant, I try to just flick it off the plant and leave it alone, hoping it will get hungry for some grasshopper eggs and eat them instead. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Grasshopper Control Page from Planet Natural

I am so pleased that I found this thread! I finished reading KL a few days ago. It was so overwhelming that I had to take a few days to digest this epic. I was 18 when I first found it lying on a shelf in my uncle's house; when I told my cousin (who had read the book a few months before) about how I wanted to read it she advised me to 'wait a few years'. I was a little offended at first... but she was right. This is a book for a mature heart and mind. I started reading it at 23, finished a few weeks later when I turned 24. The book didn't leave me with the usual sadness of missing a character or a story; it was so realistic that I said goodbye to Kristin with a finality when she died and spend everyday contemplating her life and choices. There are a few moments that stand out to me now. I'm sure when I tackle it again in a few years, I will have different observations. The character development was truely one of the most incredible feats: I started off despising Erlend for his irresponsible and selfish seduction of Kristin. I was sure he would betray her as he did Eline, I was sure he would disappoint her, that she would live to regret giving herself to this man. His actions till this point had shown rashness and denial. He was essentially a little boy. Her father, who opitimized Christian manhood and responsibility, had left a near impossible example for Erlend to imitate. He would fail her. I, as a reader, knew it. Surely then, Kristin must have known it too. And so I come to one of my saddest moments in part 1: Kristin has fought in her teenage naivete to win this man. She loved passionately because she believed, perhaps rightly, that by giving her body to this man, she had given him her future. How pure and lovely an intention if humans were perfect. It was her duty and right as a lover to claim him. (One of the wisdom's in chastity come forward - to wait till marriage to wake desires that rule your mind). Anyway, she broke her father, the steadfast virtuous Lavrans... And Success! She has won him. And even in her youth she knows, she knows, the prize has lost its shine. She is trapped by her own love of him and it is too late. The unworthy prize is hers after 3 long years. I have so much to write. But I am thinking on this small part of the book now... how much did she realize at that point? If she had married Simon, would she have always felt a need to escape? Was Erlend, in some way, despite the bitterness and hardship or because of it... in the end an aid to get her to heaven? Did she miss her vocation as a nun? Did she ever suspect her mother's secret and see the generational sorrows? If we do make a mistake (in choosing a path), do we always regret it? Just a thought - when Erlend and Kristin were going to elope before Eline came, did either of them see Aashild and Bjorn's situation as a foreshadowing of what might happen.. sins of the father? I felt it and was relieved they were spared that And just a sobering thought, it seemed appropriate considering that the root of Erlend's faults came from lust, that he should be pierced in the groin and die. Somehow... it was right to me. My opinion of Erlend did change drastically as the novel progressed though, I came to pity him and love him in a way... but this kind of symbolism has always been interesting to me Thanks for all the comments. So pleased this book is being read... one of the best books I have ever read in my life.

I would like to thank Mtn for asking two owners here a question regarding what owners expect/want from their guests. That is a very rare thing. There is a lot of pressure on owners to deliver, including perfection, for people who have very different standards, so one guest might find a dust bunny and be horrified and write a negative review while another isn't fazed by little things. I think it is important for both sides to have an attitude that, this is a relationship, it is not a one-way thing: Guests are not simply wallets for owners; owners have a responsibility to provide a clean, safe, accurately described rental; and owners are not programmable robots who can predict and meet every expectation of guests. We deal with A LOT of different personalities, ranging from totally cool and wonderful to profoundly difficult. I constantly ask myself what I can do to make my guests' vacation more pleasant, easier, etc. We appreciate it when guests ask us what they can do to make our job easier as well. I'm amazed at how so many renters nod when warned of something or asked to refrain from something...and then go and do it anyway. We have serious and often legal reasons for capacity limits, in my case asking that guests NOT launder the linens and towels (or at least not put them in the dryer to dry, thereby setting stains. I work really hard at keeping my linens and towels sanitary and spotless. Only way to do that is to line dry them), etc. I had a difficult guest tell me after the fact that 'the kitchen was cluttered'. For one thing, that is nonsense. My kitchen is very well organized. The counters are clear of everything but the coffee maker and dish drain and the container next to the stove holding cooking utensils when guests arrive. How is that cluttered? What the kitchen is is small, which is why I have TWO pictures of the kitchen on the Web site, so that people can see that it is small, from both angles, and be very aware of that fact. So you can see, no matter what you do out of consideration, there are always some people you just cannot make happy and always have to gripe. What in have been told in reading reviews is to look for patterns. That makes sense to me. If one person has a gripe, I wouldn't put much credence into it. But if five have the same complaint, that would indicate that it is an issue. Same with positives. One person saying the place is awesome is rather meaningless. Look for patterns, and look for comments having to do with how the owner/PM was to deal with, how responsive they were to issues that arise, etc. But guests also need to be responsive and care about how they are impacting someone else's property.