Clyft, I found alot of my pond items at sales and on craigslist. I even found the old stump I placed next to my pond along side the road! I purchased my initial "pond kit" on clearance. It was awful waiting till the weather broke to start digging but worth the wait. This year I expanded(doubled pond size)and made my skippy filter from a pot I bought for $25, pvc I had on hand and cleaned out the dollar store of scrubbies to fill it. I got lucky with my pump though, my father-in-law gave it to me. It pumps 1200gph. It would have cost me $175! The field stone I gathered from along side a gravel road the county was clearing to pave. It took a few trips but my husband and I got as many as I needed. There are alot of options out there to sift through. Just do TONS of reading on this site and anything else you can get your hands on. Everyone here has been a great help for me. I have roughly $250 total into my pond that is 600 gallons. You can spend much more of course. It just depends on your budget, pond size and patience to hunt down what you think you want. The location you have selected looks like a great place for a pond. A good thread on here to do a search for is "show me yours and I'll show you mine" LOTS of great ideas can come from this to help you along. I think it is currently on the first page of the forum. Also "above ground vs in ground". Look in the pond gallery as well. Of course as matt m stated build as big as you can in the beginning because you will want to expand no doubt. It is a great and addictive hobby!! Hope this helps you some.

I don't think anyone counts on the Christmas lights for supplemental lighting. I used them last year, and will again this year, to keep the soil in my potted lemon tree at or above 55 degrees (a critical temp, I understand, for citrus roots) when the rest of the GH occupants could get by on 50. I simply wrapped the string around the pot several times and then strung the excess where I pleased. If you decide to use lights, please please please be sure you use exterior grade lights! It is still absolutely critical to have these on a GFIC outlet and, even then, to use utmost care ... water and electricity are a bad combination! My greenhouse is a little Harbor Freight 6x8 and I found that it got very warm in there on sunny days, even when the temperatures outside were freezing. Some method of venting you little structure will be necessary, and a small fan for air circulation probably advisable in any case. You sound very resourceful and like you're having fun with this ... keep it up and good luck!

Hi Michiele, Landscaping around a pool that is in full sun, or at least in lots and lots of sun, can be very challenging. Often the heat that reflects from the pool and the pool deck are very hard on plants. When you are landscaping near a pool area, I think grass is always best because it can take the most abuse, from being walked on, having beach balls bounce through it, etc. To keep weeds to a minimum, put down a good quality woven landscape fabric, plant your grasses and add some mulch. When choosing a mulch, it is often better to use some sort of stone like river rock or lava rock because bark mulches tend to blow into the pool. Interplanting a taller ground cover like ornamental grass with a shorter ground cover can be difficult. Creeping ground covers like Asian Jasmine or Boston Ivy may tend to 'climb' up the clumps of grass. If you have a taller ornamental grass, then a shorter ground cover may get too shaded by the taller grasses and not fill in as well as you would like. You might try ice plant or creeping sedum. They also are creepers more than vining climbers so they would be easier to maintain. Both are very tough and can handle the reflected heat from the pool's concrete or stone surround. If you are going to have a taller form of ornamental grass, you could use ornamental blue fescue, fiber optic grass or blue-eyed grass as the shorter plant to fill in around the larger ones. It can be hard to combine ornamental grasses with shorter ground covers underneath them because the shorter plants can be overwhelmed by the larger grasses. A mixed planting of ornamental grasses, creeping groundcovers and dwarf shrubs can be used quite effectively if the plants are in scale with one another. You might go to the website for High Country Gardens (I think it is www.highcountrygardens.com) and look at their ground covers. They have a lot of uncommon plants that are suited to tough conditions. Good luck, Dawn

Go to the sewing machine store, and spend an hour or two. Have the sales person go through the machine and show you how it all works. You'll know feed dogs, tension, etc. in no time. Since you mentioned that you want a sturdy good quality machine, you'll want a brand that is made in Europe. Janome, Bernina, Pfaff, or Viking are all good quality well-made machines with their fan clubs. (Good engineering, metal parts, solid construction.) Expect to pay for a good sewing machine what you would for a pretty good computer. You don't necessarily need an industrial machine but check and see what the dealer says about comparisons. You would go to a different dealer for the industrial machines. Much like a car, you can test-drive sewing machines. Bring some material samples to see how the stitches go and how it "feels". Like cars, sometimes a couple are just really similar, so what it comes down to is feel and where the buttons are and does it seem easier to operate this one or that one. Ask the dealer about the embroidery features. You can buy a system that will enable you to: scan or otherwise create a design, "digitize" it so that the machine understands how to sew it, and save it in a way that your machine will understand, and interface your machine with your computer. You will need to learn about how all this software works. If you have messed with images and photoshop or some other photo manipulation program, you won't have any trouble with figuring out the software. There's a bit of trial and error on the actual stitching. Fabrics vary in thickness and need to have a stiffener so that they won't scrunch all up when you stitch that much thread into a design on them. If you do a really big design, say on a 16" by 16" pillow top, you'll need to learn all that hooping stuff that Joan was talking about. That is because the machine can only sew on a relatively small area. Though there is a bit of a learning curve, really phenomenal things can be done with the machine embroidery. For home sewing, check your library for home dec how-tos. That'll get you started on the pillows/curtains etc. Here is a link that might be useful: Embroidery Arts link