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. ;-)

Chicagardens, Thxs, i always have a lil problem with cut & paste :/ but I think I could get help if I ever do that #. No rough edges if you go completely around with your can opener, My wife sometimes cuts and leave a little bit to pry open the other end and I'd say, HEY!!! you just messed up my succulent container because then it will be DANGEROUS.:/ Planto, Good question, My eldest son was the easiest outta the boy's but seems the older he gets the more trouble he can find Lol.. ( he's 37 yrs old.) My daughters were all easy But I did'nt want any girls ( To raise) But I'm glad I had them becuz they're a Total blessing to me, however the youngest one (21 has alway's thought she was the BOSS of everything Lol.. :) Thxs for asking. And as far the OLdest One taking all the cuttings I really don't mind, Because he's always helping me @ the house when he comes over. Well now I'm at work so I's got to go! have a nice day ya'll. Greg

I came back looking for that advice from iowa about bigger worms. I need to try some of that. I appreciated it when I read back then, but not sure if I got to write a thanks. So, thanks for that. I didn't get out fishing much until the last month. The bins I filled in Feb need to be harvested soon to side dress my garden crops. Half a bin done so far, a bunch to go. I may try the burlap ideas. Between the indoor bins, an outside plastic tote, and two big compost piles, I have plenty of worms to fish with and make dirt. But I STILL haven't concentrated on increasing individual size and skin toughness. The buckets I started this year to "multiply" the best of the herd failed spectacularly. The buckets developed white hairy mold in no time flat. I lost all the experimental subjects, as I recall, even the nice big ones that were a couple years old. Could have been a lot of things and probably was a bit of everything. It was awhile back now, but the possible reasons I recall were my garden dirt being too dry before starting, the old dog food was two years older, and the holes I put in the buckets were ice picked from the bottom up, instead of top down. The first time, a couple years back, I used mostly vegetable scrap as food, and the dirt was relatively freshly dug. This time it was all old dog food, and I remember the dirt I dug sat for quite a while before I made up the buckets.

Right back at you Stacy. Cookie8 and Jim, thank you for the kudos. Jim, I'm a little jealous of you, but my hips are --somewhat-- relieved that I live much further away from the bakery than you. Although, these muffins are worth the extra half hour on a treadmill. I found this recipe in a book by Lora Brody. It is not her recipe, but, she fully credited the owner/baker of the Cottage Street Bakery, Joanna Keeley. Where the owner got it from? I couldn't care less. I love them. Glad you all do too. Jim, the Cottage Street Bakery uses whole milk in their recipe, but I don't see why you couldn't substitute skim milk. That said, I still highly recommend whole buttermilk because I'm a rebel.[grin] Sol