Carol, mine would generally be considered partially to mostly closed, I believe. When I obtained my 90 and 55 gal tanks, the top glass came with each. (The 90gal was a garage sale purchase, and the 55gal a hand-me-down from a friend's father who decided that after 20-30 years he was tired of keeping cichlids.) With the 55gal, the top glass covers about 75-80% of the tank -- it's missing the rubber "hinge" section as well as the plastic backsplash section. With the 90gal, about 90% of the tank. Having the top glass does help with keeping the humidity higher and more consistent. The only way the "above fluoros" would be anything more than useless would be if the tubes sat across the top of the tank. Sorry about that. You are absolutely correct that you would need to provide supplemental lighting. I did have a buddy who did just that with one of his larger terrs. He got 2 -two bulb 4ft shoplights and sat them across the top of the tank. Worked well. My tanks both have simple hoods I designed and my dad helped me make years back when I went upstate to visit. Each hood is hinged so I can flip back half of the hood to access the tank and the bulbs. The hoods -- from front to back -- cover about 90% of each tank. For lights I use six 200W equivalent coiled fluorescent bulbs in my 90gal and four 200W equv + two 100W equiv in my 55 gal. I have pondered trying some of the newer tube LEDs (I know a grower who supplies plants to the pdf hobbyists. He has done a great deal of investigating to find a brand of LED he feels will actually work for growing plants... as opposed to the junky ones you will find at a BBS.) Unfortunately, the suckers are EXPENSIVE. That has held me back. I'm currently testing out 2 LED tube bulbs on my plant stand. I'll see how they work out. (Definitely a LOT less heat than even regular fluoros, but haven't had them in play long enough to see what the plants think of them.) If your tanks are open, you will have to play much closer attention to humidity issues ... or more to the point a lack there of. Even without a top, you should wind up with an overall higher humidity level within the tank than the rest of the room. And depending upon just what plants you wish to grow, the humidity levels you will need to maintain may or not be more challenging to maintain in an open system. The buddy of mine who had the shoplights lying across his tank had a stream running through the tank (I think it may have been a 125gal L tank but it has been too long so memory is fuzzy.) The stream kept the tank envir. quite humid even though the tank was open.

"I planted Holy basil and regular basil this spring. The honeybees and several different bees, wasps and butterflies love it. Along with lots of green spiders. Unfortunately, I've only seen the green spiders eat beneficials." Thanks for mentioning the basil, it is another excellent bee plant for the vegetable garden. As for spiders... my observations mirror yours. Spiders are indiscriminate killers - and they are just as likely to kill beneficial insects as harmful ones. They are often listed as "beneficial", but I would rate them neutral at best. I've also had some nasty bites from spiders, and those bites heal slowly, so I don't have a great love for them. Fortunately, the wasp population in my property is very high - including mud daubers. Some of them hunt spiders, and do so very effectively... so the spider population in my garden is very low. Only those which spin webs at night & hide during the day escape the wasps, which suits me just fine. Never tried Murphy's Oil. I've used insecticidal soap, sometimes as part of the following recipe. It was contributed by Jimster several years ago, and is a great starting point for formulating your own insect sprays: INSECTICIDE: A U.S.D.A. formula combining oil and soap is effective in killing soft-bodied insects. Mix 1 cup peanut, safflower, corn, soybean, or sunflower oil with 1 tablespoon liquid dishwashing detergent. To make the spray, use 11/2 teaspoons of the oil-detergent mixture for each cup of water. As I mentioned above, I've tried several different variations of soap spray, sometimes with oil or alcohol. Since soap spray primarily works by blocking insect respiration, I even used sugar as an additive, when I was trying to kill cucumber beetles. Figured that would really clog their spiracles, and it seemed to help. Molasses might be even more effective, provided you can get it to dissolve. The advantage of using insecticidal soap (such as Safers) is that it is potassium based, and will cause less leaf damage. You can also use dish soap or baby shampoo, which is what I normally use. But in stronger concentrations (which may be required, depending upon what pest it will be applied to) there may be some leaf damage if the spray is allowed to remain on the leaves. Provided you are just targeting small areas, that is no big deal... but if spraying young plants, or covering a larger area (such as a squash bug infestation) then the spray should be washed off when it has done its work. Sucking insects die pretty quickly, you could rinse the leaves off after 15 minutes or so. For beetles, you just need to watch to see how effective the spray will be... it's possible a second spraying might be necessary. Beetle larvae are easier to kill than the adults, which can be remarkably resistant to soap spray... they will be temporarily paralyzed, but slowly recover. Cucumber beetles are a great example of this, they are pretty hard to kill. You really need full body coverage when spraying beetles, and a little alcohol in the mix will prevent them from flying away while you give them a good soaking. When trying out a soap spray the first time, observe its effect on the target insect. It's worth mentioning that while soap sprays have little to no no lingering toxic effect, they will kill most insects they are sprayed on. I've used the alcohol spray in my previous post to kill yellowjackets, it will knock them right out of the air. If bees or other beneficials get sprayed, it will kill them too.

Hi Marie! It sounds like you're having a great time and we'll be looking forward to those toddler pictures... Your baby Bouv. here is doing well. I consider all puppy accidents to be the fault of us humans for not paying attention/reading the signals right. It takes a bit of time to adjust to read her particular language so some accidents were expected... Today was a very mellow day here. Misty has now fully accepted Phoebe as a member of her pack - she initiated her into the joys of head wrestling today...:-) Head wrestling is a game she and Copper invented. The only rule I enforce is that the big beast has to keep her feet on the ground. The way it works is Misty is on higher ground (the lounger on the back porch in today's case) and the big dog is standing on the floor beside her. Misty pounces on the big dog's head and that dog tries to grab her and flip her over. They then proceed to wrestle back and forth until one of them tires of the game. Unfortunately I didn't have the camera with me so didn't get any pictures, but maybe some of you remember the pictures of her and Copper playing on the loveseat. The same thing was going on with Phoebe this moning on the lounger on the back porch. Barb was here today. She and Phoebe got along very well and they had a vigorous game of chase-me (Barb pretended to chase Phoebe and Phoebe joyously raced around the paths...) We all went for a walk past the library to drop off some books. I like this picture, in part because the sign on the library window says Laugh Out Loud - a comedy reading program for kids - seems appropriate for Phoebe! Here's the classic Woody's Doggie Holiday Camp picture from this afternoon (just after this picture Phoebe nuzzled my waist with her head, rooted in the training pouch with dog cookies that I'm wearing, and absconded with a cookie or two! I handn't realized the pouch was unzipped... She's a smart dog. Misty and Phoebe are definitely much mellower together now. When Randy got home tonight, we went for the third walk of the day. Zoe (yearling Rottweiller) was out on her driveway so introductions were made. Phoebe was skittish but eager; Zoe was dubious :-) A generous dose of cookies was applied all round. It takes more than a strange big hairy dog on her driveway to keep Zoe away from her cookies! So Phoebe had a good day at camp today :-)

Emma, We always have had snakes here in plentiful amounts, but then our back property line sits only about a quarter-mile from the Red River, so it would be shocking if we didn't have oodles of snakes. I can link the rise and fall of our snake population more to the river itself than to the weather. After a big rainfall year like 2007 when there was widespread flooding, we hardly saw any snakes at all whatsoever for the next year.(it was terrific!) Then,after almost 13" of rain in one day and widespread flash flooding in April 2009, we didn't see many snakes at all until thef following spring. I suspect the flooding had made a big dent in their population in both 2007 and 2009. 2010 seemed normal. In 2011, we saw relatively few. Perhaps the heat had a negative impact on the survival of their young. In every summer, as it gets hotter and drier and the ponds and creeks dry up, the snakes we do have will move to any available body of water, including a bird bath or small water lily pond, but I don't think we have more....I just think they venture closer to us humans out of necessity. I always think that we have too many snakes, but then the one neighbor to our W/NW whose home sits between us and the Red River has vastly more snakes than we do. I am glad his property is there as a buffer between our place and the river. He can sit on his front porch and shoot snakes night after night after night and still more and more keep coming. Bre, With repeated efforts, the kids will learn. Country kids learn at an early age that there are some things they need to be really careful about. Sometimes, though I think we forget to look at things from their perspective. When our son was dating a young woman who had a little girl who was then just a toddler, she and I built a Peter Rabbit potager garden. We spend oodles of time playing in the dirt, reading the simplest versions of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and planting similar crops in our Peter Rabbit Garden. She was so excited, and so was I, but for different reasons. We had a darling little picket fence, but we had completely different attitudes towards the fence and the Peter Rabbit Garden. I wanted to close the gate to keep the real cottontail rabbits out of the Peter Rabbit Garden, but she wanted to leave the gate open at night so that Peter Rabbit and his friends could come into the garden and eat! Clearly, we had different ideas about the purpose of the garden, and this experience taught me to remember to look at things from a 2 or 3 year-old child's perspective and not just my own. Be sure your hoe is sharpened so that it will chop a snake in half. A dull hoe won't do the job and you do not want to have an angry snake that feels threatened coming at you. We see brown snakes all the time here. They just turn and run. I believe they are as startled by seeing us as we are by seeing them. Oops, I forgot to link the website earlier that has photos of snakes of Oklahoma....I'll link it now. Occasionally we have lost a cat to snakebite but not a dog, and my little cat, Spots, who is sitting here on the couch beside me as I type this has been bitten twice. She rarely goes outside any more....though it is hard to guess if her love of sleeping on the sofa in the air-conditioned house is related to past bad experiences with snakes or not. One cat almost died, but then survived. He was almost comatose for almost two weeks from a copperhead biite to his groin area, and still bears the scar. He is the only cat we've had that had the copper rash in the area where he was bitten. One of our neighbors who was bitten by a copperhead had a similar rash near the site of her bite. One of our neighbors had an old little dog named Rascal when we moved here. He might not have been a full-blooded rat terrier, but his appearance was somewhat like a rat terrier. That was the bravest little dog I've ever seen. He completely hated snakes. When he saw one, he'd catch it, shake it a certain way to break its neck, and then would skin it and eat it. He was a completely amazing little dog. He lived to a pretty old age and then just disappeared. We always assumed a coyote or something got him. The cougar encounters were quite unsettling at the time. I always thought it would be cool to see one "in the wild" until I actually sow one. When we were in our pickup truck going someplace and saw two walk across the road in front of us, that was cool. Having one roar at me? Not cool. Having one in the yard twice in one year, and right by my garden. Not cool. I have to be honest and say that for a couple of months after those two incidents, I only went to my garden to harvest and then immediately came back inside. Being out there made my skin crawl. For a couple of years after that, every time I walked down to the spot where I saw the second one, which was about 12' from me when I first noticed it, my body had an involuntary reaction.....heart pounding, fear, that fight-or-flight feeling. I was worried that my brain would never "get over" that experience and always would feel creeped out, but eventually I got to where I could be in that area without having the feeling of fear. Your location sort of guarantees you'll see lots of wildlife and most of it will be a wonderful experience. I love seeing all the wildlife as long as I am in a location where I don't feel like they can get to me. Just today we had a turtle laying eggs under the plum tree (she lays her eggs there every year) and a wild turkey walking up and down the driveway and all around my garden. The turkey has been here for weeks. It is a male looking for a female and apparently can't find one, so it does the mating dance for my chickens who stand in their fenced chicken room and stare at it like it is an idiot, why their roosters just all puffed up and upset and stomp around trying to scare off the turkey. Usually one of our more bold cats will start walking towards the turkey and it then will vanish into the woods. I enjoy having that sort of wildlife around, but don't like seeing the predators too much. Nothing flusters my son, who is a professional firefighter or my husband, who is a cop, but the cougar incidents came close. Of course, they were inside the house either watching TV or on their computers each time and missed the really exciting part. Both of them have shot their share of snakes and skunks. The gators are rare, but not unheard of. Sometimes they are found in or very near the Red River. Sometimes they have made themselves at home in a stock tank. It always makes the news specifically because it is so rare. The year before we bought our land, which was 1997, a gator was found in a stock tank on property about a half mile from ours. On the day I drove up from Fort Worth so I could be here on the day that the electric co-op guys were installing our poles and electric lines and our water co-op was putting in our water line, the guys working here warned me that two different people----one in town in Marietta and one right here on our road---had been bitten by snakes that day. With one of them, the snake wouldn't let go of the person, so the medics had to cut the body off the snake and take the person to the ER with the snake still attached to the person's body. That was a creepy image. Those utility workers wanted to be sure I understood just how many snakes we have around here, so that I would be careful. I appreciated so much that they were so concerned. (I also was horrified when I thought about how we had walked all over that property with the real estate guy when we were considering buying it....we walked through Johnson grass in the bar ditch that was head high, we walked all over the woods, the fields, up and down the creeks, etc. We went places I never go now because there's always so many snakes there! Live and learn..... We have bats every summer. I love seeing them. They are one thing you do need to teach your kids not to touch, for obvious reasons. They usually come out around twilight and, at least at our place, they always flock to the outdoor security light looking for bugs. I love to sit out in the lawn chairs and watch them. Discovering the bat activity here was a really neat surprise. Feral hogs are very dangerous and can kill a person. A couple of ranchers west of Marietta had some very close calls with them and narrow escapes from them a couple of years ago. I usually hear them before I see them, and I always go inside when I see them. Well, once I did go into the woods looking for them (what was I thinking?) and found them in the creek....they often travel the creeks, which often have only very shallow water in them....and then I hightailed it right back to the house. The first time a feral hog ran out into the road in front of me, it was so big that I was sure I was seeing a hippo. I see them more often when we are out at wildfires in remote locations than when we are at home on our own property. I don't like seeing them. They tend to be really aggressive. I see coyotes a lot, and have had our dogs get in fights with them, which scares me. My dogs are pet mutts, not livestock guardian dogs and pet dogs often get the worst end of the deal when they tangle with coyotes. There is nothing worse than hearing a fight to the death between a coyote and dog and thinking that it might be your dog. It wasn't....but the sound of it all was so terrifying that a neighbor came running from about 100 yards away to check on me because he thought the coyote fight was on our property....it might have been, but it was west of the house in a dense woodland....and he and I both knew all our dogs were home and accounted for. You cannot be a gardener and avoid wildlife because it will be out there with you and your children. Most of the time, you'll love seeing it. Even the animals I personally find frightening are still something that it is thrilling to see....after you get over the fear. Most coyotes turn and run. I've had more trouble with deer that want to pick a fight with me than with coyotes. About 90% of the time, the coyotes turn and run. We had trouble with a couple of coyotes for a few months that looked like cross-breeds between coyotes and domestic canines. A neighbor called them coyote hybrids and warned me that they had enough domestic dog in them that they didn't fear humans like normal coyotes do, and I sure did learn that for myself. I love living here but I've told Tim many times that if I every encounter a bear near my garden, I'm packing up and moving back to Texas. I wouldn't actually do it, but at that point it would seem like a great idea. We rarely have wildlife in our garden any more because we kept raising the fence higher and higher to keep the wildlife out. Now both the front garden and the back garden have fences 8' tall, and both have two gates....because you need a way out if a wild thing comes in one gate. The worst sound I've ever heard is the rattle of a rattlesnake. I always freeze in my tracks and try to determine which direction the rattle is coming from so I can go in the opposite direction. The closest I've ever had a venomous snake to me was a pygmy rattler about two inches from my hand. When I saw it, I instantly and instinctively did a backwards somersault (I was crouching low to the ground before I saw it) to get away from it....and I was glad no one was around to see that odd movement. It was in late February or early March when the snakes usually are not out and about. I have seen snakes out in every month except January, though we usually see them only from about March or April through November. Some breeds of snakes are very aggressive, but others are a lot more passive and would rather flee than stay there and fight you. I try to give them a chance to flee and get away. All my neighbors will come over and shoot a snake for me, and sometimes more than one will come and I will think to myself "they are having too much fun with this.....:". I appreciate them though, and think we have the absolute best neighbors in the world. It is one of the reasons I love living here. On the page linked below, click on the photo gallery to see the various snakes featured there. There are 46 kinds of snakes in OK, but only 7 of them are venomous. At our house, brush piles and compost piles are prone to have snakes lying around them in the summer months, so I pile on the compostable materials, but I never turn the pile and I only remove compost from it in winter. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Snakes of Oklahoma