Hi, Absolutely throw away every plant. Clean out all of the gravel and soil and throw that way too. They have all been contaminated with snails and worms. And make sure you sterilize everything with bleach that goes back into the terrarium including the aquarium. This is very important or you will just introduced the snails and worms back into your terrarium. Using a base of stones sounds good. The jury is still out on the charcoal. Some people think it is needed. Other people say that once the charcoal has absorbed all it can it will start to put contaminants back into the echo system. Next, one needs to put a barrier in between the base and the substrate. This keeps the potting medium from falling into and in between the rocks. The rocks don't do much good if there are no air spaces in between them. Nylon screen from the hardware store works very well. Make sure you get the nylon screen not metal screen. Put your potting medium on top of the screen. What rhizo means by " soilless mix" is a potting a medium that is devoid of loam and worm castings. In other words no dirt. One soilless mix could be milled spagnum, vermiculite and perlite. There are other soilless mixes that one can make or buy. I'm going to let Al and rhizo chime in on that one. I don't know if you know it, but there is a terrarium forum on GW. You might ask some of your questions over there too. Also, start reading through all of the entries. There is a wealth of information out there. Black jungle also has a page devoted to setting up a terrarium. I will put a link to it below. They talk about co-co bedding at black jungle. Again, the jury is out on that too. The people over on the terrarium forum swear by it. The people on the African violet forum swear at it. African violets seem to do poorly in co-co bedding. Since I will have a couple of violets in my terrarium I will not be using the mix. Anyway, I hope this helps. Again, I'm just new to this too. Good luck. Larry Here is a link that might be useful: Terrarium Basics

I am actually an entomologist (urban) and would like to share what I know. First, ant workers do not eat solid foods directly. Instead, they bring them back to the nest and feed them to the larvae which in turn digest the solids and turn them into a Liquidy substance the adults can them eat. All solids are handled this way. So the notion that they are feeding upon the grits and exploding just is not possible. What may be occurring is it is causing the larvae to pop breaking the life cycle and collapsing the colony. With monogynous species of ant (only one queen) this could have a devastating effect. Polygynous species like odorous house ants have so many queens this may not have an effect (ie odorous house ants). Ants in the genus Formica (field or mound ants) often go overlooked in yards as they do not often invade homes. But their "cow herding" of aphids is a concern. They will actually protect them from natural predation so they can collect the honeydew they exude. I will look at the entomological society of americas research paper portal to see if any papers exist regarding the use of grits as a control measure. I would recommend using abamectin b1 based baits for ants as they are organic approved by most agencies (they are derived from organisms in the soil). Also. Numerous boric acid based granular baits will work as well (technically an inorganic as it does not contain carbon but it is approved on the USDA 25b organic pesticides list). In severe cases a non organic alternative might be products like Duponts advion (since sold to syngenta) which utilizes indoxacarb a bio active metabolite which was given reduced risk status by the EPA. A fire ant version also exists. As with all pesticides, ALWAYS follow label directions when they are used. Hope this sheds some light!

Bt is very effective on cats that are half grown or less. So, you'll need to search-and-destroy the larger ones. And because none of your attacked crops need to be pollinated, you can use row cover now, as long as you lift the cover to search-and-destroy the larger ones every day until they're gone. Next season, put it on very loosely when you seed/transplant. This post was edited by jean001a on Sun, Jun 8, 14 at 19:03

The common yellow oxalis we have here has tiny "bulbules" (sp?), which lurk 12 -18 inches under the ground. You can easily pull up the plants, of course, but those tiny bulb things stay under the soil, and up it comes again. I once had a gardener who decided to eradicate it from a flower bed which is about 12 feet long and 6 feet wide. He actually dug up the top 2 feet of soil, and sifted it by hand to get all of the tiny bulbs out. That worked for the first year, but by 2-3 years after he did that, back the oxalis came. So, being lazy, what I do is just admire it in the Spring, except where it is trying to smother other plants. Then just pull it out around those plants. By late Spring here it has died down, and I pretend it is gone. Of course, it comes up again the next Spring. It is one of our first blooming plants to bloom (starts Jan/Feb), so I just regard it as such and let it be mostly. One of my cats likes to eat it (we used to eat it as children - we called it "sour grass"). Jackie