Very funny bfly8. Out of all the bugs I've dealt with, these guys don't do the most harm, but do love my hostas! I'm with marric, I'm an organic gardener (IPM) and try to avoid poisons if possible. The voles are making me rethink this....I don't want them eating all my plants again this fall! I've got plenty of birds, but my beds surround my house, and they have enough food so that they won't come that close to feed. Darn. I'll try the yeast method if we finally get the fall rain we usually have, or wait to until next spring and let you guys know how it worked(if you're interested). It's cheap, only requires some shallow cans and a pkt. of yeast, I think.

The tabs really do a great job (there are some older threads with loads of posts singing their praises!). We used Cascade Complete initially, but Miele came out with the tabs sometime around when we first started using our DW. A bunch of GW'ers tried them and kept raving about them so we decided to give them a try. The CC worked perfectly fine and everything came out spotless. However, the tabs seem to give the loads an extra level of clean and sparkle. Also, the air in the DW just had a fresher quality (odor) after running a load with the tab vs CC. The DW after a CC cleaned load isn't bad, just less fresh smelling. FWIW, some on this forum use 1/2 a tab (and possibly even 1/4 tab?) to clean most loads. Again, my stuff comes out fine with a 1/2 tab, but a full tab just seems to raise that sparkle and clean to another level. It's not overly noticeable, in fact, I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me, but some others here have said the same thing. We don't usually run our DW every day, so I like the sense of security (that everything will get clean) that using a full tab gives. Last night I had a pretty empty DW, but one of those few items was a stinky plastic food container that would have been quite foul smelling by morning let alone this evening, so I ran the DW before bed instead of waiting, with a 1/2 tab and everything came out great. PS there were some posters who had trouble with grit (undisolved soap powder) build up in their rack glides from using Ecover so you might want to do a search for those threads discussing that.

Box sealing tape is OK but the silver miracle, aka duct tape is far better. Pat with it, don't rub it. And don't pet the cats with it, pat them if yer gonna. I've heard the suggestion to use rubber gloves for furniture and the like, but it seems usually you need to have a firm backing for brushing it off. So put the clothes on and give each other a massage maybe? Or use the tape and play police officer and frisk each other. Duct tape works as an adequate substitute for handcuffs, as I'm sure you well-know. Come to think of it I used to have one of those brushes that you'd brush one direction, then brush in the other direction to empty the brush out. One style had the head of the unit slide back and forth on the handle for left or right hand use, one style was just the head part itself and another was on a pivoting head. It worked well. Wonder where that went? Don't see them for sale anymore but you might find them if you look around.

Some of the pics did not show up, so here we go..... magma black Juparana sierra dolce vita and here is my floor under natural light Thanks Usha