Ground cover is, I agree, appropriate to many situations. Prolly not to this one, though, given the OP's concern about his lawn. (He'll likely have to give up having any gorgeous grass in that sideyard.) Whether water is precious depends on where you are. Dallas? Yes. BUT...you don't need St. Augustine in Dallas. All hail Bermuda grass there! Houston? Rarely is there a drought severe enough to cause a temporary water concern. As for there, St. Augustine or "stickers" are your choices. Mobile, AL, is another place that needs St. Augustine. And rain? Try the rainiest city in the lower 48! Different regions have different concerns--some have water concerns, while fertilizer runoff is a lot more troublesome in others. (Apparently, the strawberries that annoy me so in my grass? A noxious invasive exotic. Great. Suggestions for getting rid of them or even controlling them? Pretty darned feeble, as far as I can tell.) Trying to nurse a lawn that won't ever do very well into a state of verdant, glowing health is going to do a lot more damage than watering a lawn up to two times a week in August in many places. 1" per week *includes* natural rainfall and only applies to the growing season, BTW. Areas that need St. Augustine that I've lived in have ranged from 36 to more than 40 inches of rain per year, on average. That's not much water. It's less than I had to put on my "xeric" plants in NM while they were getting established. (You should have seen me panicking when I first planted them and they started to wither even though I was watering them, in my mind, "all the time"--meaning once a week. *snort* Yes, in a high-wind, high-elevation, semi-desert environment!) I am ALL for choosing a low-maintenance ground cover--*where it works*. I haven't found a single satisfactory replacement for a lawn for kids to play on. I've looked. "Light to medium foot traffic" groundcovers won't do it, though goodness knows I wish they would. And many people live in areas in which replacing a "merely decorative" front yard is either culturally unacceptable--take that as you will--or is actually explicitly restricted by covenants or zoning laws. And that's assuming that the OWNERS like them. In those cases, the best you can do is make large beds which you can try to make as low-maintenance as possible. (Honestly, for 9/10ths or more of people, high maintenance is a bad idea from any standpoint, anyway. Vacations, boredom, illness, business--all of these things would intervene in a strict routine of trimming, spraying, fertilizing, etc., etc., to such an extent that the landscape would soon look pretty pathetic. And so often does! I am WAY too lazy to do that and bitterly, bitterly disappointed that I'll have to water the slope in back next year at least four times to keep back that $%# crab grass.) As for Lyme disease--I'd rather not have my kids--or the neighbors' kids--get it by playing in my yard. I can check myself after going out. I can trust other adults to do it, too. Stripping down elementary schoolers every time they go outside--and in summer, they're banging in and out all the time--is practically insane, but it was the only alternative to treating the 1/8th of an acre that's the major play area last year. We had started averaging, literally, a tick a week. I looked up the incidence of tick-borne diseases in our area, and the statistics were NOT good. Now, I hate using pesticides. This was the first time that I'd personally applied them. I'm killing all sorts of critters I'd LOVE to have in my back yard, but if it's that or a sick kid, I'm grabbing my bag of pesticide. Of course, I COULD just keep the deer out somehow. If you can suggest an effective and economical way of keeping deer out of a 2-acre spread, part of which is wetland, please do! *g* I mean really, I'd love to know, 'cuz I have an azalea that's looking bedraggled nearly 2 years after some young buck decided that it was an all-you-can-eat salad bar for several week running. I have another question, though, purely hypothetical at this point. In one area I lived in, we wouldn't get a hard freeze once every four years or so. And in those years, no matter how we treated the dogs (pills, sprays, collars, what-have-you), they would bring in hundreds of fleas--dozens with every trip outside--that would set up home and eat people and pets constantly. The dogs went piebald with scratching, and we were covered in bites. How can you get rid of fleas at that level of infestation without using a pesticide? We did every de-flea-your-house trick known to man, BTW, from vacuuming more than once a day to the dust that dessicates them. After going through every other option the first year, my dad (who, BTW, has a master's degree in a wildlife field!) broke down and went the poison-the-yard route--which worked beautifully, knocking back the numbers hard enough that bites were rare rather than constant. I do want to makes a BIG point about using "organics." Raw sewage is organic. It is also devastating to the environment. Soooo many gardeners like to make a big point about how they only use ORGANIC compost/worm castings/whatever on their plants. The streams really. don't. care. whether the nitrogen that gets dumped in them from your/my garden is from 100% certified premium organic sources or from cheapo-granulated nitrogen pellets. It doesn't make a difference! I like compost for all sorts of reasons, including reduced runoff and reduced chances of burning a plant because of slower release. But I don't pretend that there's "good organic nitrogen" and "bad inorganic nitrogen"--once it runs off, it's just plain ol' nitrogen. Sorry for sounding condescending--it was meant to be a drawl. ;-)

Greetings, JoD and Jeremy! Please do keep any of the following comments or critiques for what they are intended to be -- constructive 'criticisms' or well meant advice. JoD, just a 'heads up', do be keep in mind that you can very easily get unwanted inhabitants by utilizing materials from the great outdoors. Also many of your outdoor plants will likely have issues being indoors year round. Plants from temperate zones typically require a cool to cold winter dormancy to remain vigorous. Also, be very careful of what you "harvest" from the wild. For example, in many states (and I believe yours is one of them) it is ILLEGAL to remove trilliums from the wild. Furthermore in the case of trilliums, they do not take to root disturbance well, their soil requirements are quite specific, and a cold winter dormancy is a MUST. If you cannot provide all of these conditions and the rest of its needs, you are consigning it to an early grave. Your bonsai idea, while nifty in theory will, unfortunately, present a number of very real challenges. 1) As mentioned above, many temperate plants need a cool to cold dormancy. In the case of temperate trees this is a requirement not an option for the tree to remain healthy. A cedar is no exception. 2) Excellant air circulation is also mandatory -- something which can be difficult to accomplish in a terr. 3) Lighting will be a major issue. Trees have very high light requirements. Trying to providing sufficient light without overheating your tank will be highly problematic. 4) If you do solve all of the above issues, then there is at least one more cautionary note I wish to give you -- plan on needing to leave the tree in it's pot. To keep a tree in bonsai form, you will need to regularly prune both the branches and the roots. Assuming you are able to solve issues 1-3 and the tree is not in a pot, it will send its roots throughout the tank which would make root pruning difficult to impossible. I hope I have't come across as a 'wet blanket', but in addition to believing in responsible plant and animal husbandry, I'd like to help you avoid many of the common mistakes folks make. Nice terr idea, Jeremy. Out of curiosity, which plant are you refering to as "baby tears"? The fittonia is in the middle of course, the peperomia to either side I assume and the one at 12 o'clock is a pothos. Not sure where the "baby tears" are. Btw, don't get bummed if it takes awhile for responses. This is often a rather slow forum. Problem is, folks only have the space for a limited # of terrs. So after making theirs, there often isn't much to update or inquire about so they don't come back very often.

There is nothing big time wrong with what you posted and quite a lot looks very good - all of my comments are being "bit-fiddly." You might consider is having the second dw be an 18" dishwasher possibly paired with a two drawer dishwasher? It would give you a place for big/tall items in the little dw and a good bit of space for plates/bowls/glasses/silverware. I am in two minds about the ovens and that stack above it... Some of what I'm thinking is mutually exclusive - so think of this as just ideas. I wonder if you could use some other way of "dooring" the uppers over the ovens. Every time you take something out of one side, its opening and closing two doors right over the counter where you'd like to be stacking up the stuff you're taking out. Maybe use a pair of sliding doors or lift doors. It looks pretty enough, but I think the sliders or open shelves would work better. If you're going to raise the ovens, I'd go further (like the bottom of the steam oven at counter height), It makes it easier to just pivot with hot stuff and yields another drawer underneath. Be aware that USING the ovens may likely disturb the chef at the cooktop. By using I mean opening doors and putting stuff in or taking out. Also, having main food storage above the ovens will mean a lot of traffic. I'm wondering if the ovens should go on the peninsula (at 42" - 48" tall) and cleanup back on the long wall? I'm usually a big fan of perimeter clean up, so I totally don't like this. It would give you some long, straight counter, tho and more configurations for dish storage. Lastly, two other thinks drawn about island design. Top is about what you have - roughly to scale - but showing the sink in a different location and assuming the dishwasher does move out. I also noted a small issue with seating. The space in the corner "belongs" to the seating on only one side. It's possible you intended the other cabinet to be smaller or something that didn't come through to my tiny mind. With this or the original layout, I would strongly consider moving the ref to the freezer location and scooting the frzr over. It gets the ref closer to the dish storage and gets the little peoples out of the prep corridor. You could mount a micro over there and get rid of all the snackers too. If the ref leaves, the ovens can stack where the ref was with trays and baking dishes over and under the stack. The bottom can then be filled with drawers for more food and/or prep gear. The other think on the bottom of the drawing makes a bigger prep area on the one side of the cooktop by combining pot drawers with the top of the drawers for storing dishes. It moves cooking from being directly in front of the oven doors and makes dumping a pot of hot water not even a step away. Yet another undrawn think if you don't mind birdie seating would be to put the prep sink on the 51" end and slide the cooktop even closer to that side. Could be used as a pot filler as well as a hand and veg washer. Another 'nother undrawn think would be prep sink under the window between the ref and the ovens. Bit less convenient, but yields a lot more usable prep space on the island. Another strike is it draws more traffic into the "prep corridor."

Ok back from DG! Checked the label again and it is a Pine Sol bottle with pine branches on it. In the ingredients label it says 'contains pine oil'. I did get a pic but it is too blurry to bother posting. Also doesn't say how much pine oil. The PineSol bottle next to it had a plain label on it so I am assuming this is the newest version. I hope noone thinks I am beating a dead horse over this. But I think it's interesting and I have no life-HA!