[GarterGuy]

Hello Edward,
Glad to hear you're into getting back into garters. Yeh, quite a bit has changed. I just started getting back into them myself a few years ago. As far as the substrate thing goes...I really like CareFresh bedding. It's sort of like recylced newsprint looking, but it works really well, isn't too horribly expensive (unless you have a HUGE collection), and cleans up really well. Also it's safe if the snakes accidentally ingest any of it. Oh and it's light enough that thet can burrow in it as well (my male concinnus used to have a network of tunnels in his cage.). You can actually still use newpaper for them too and actually for babies, I use plain white paper towls....this is more so I can monitor there stools then anything else. Also some use the various types of barks and woodchip type substrates. As far as being messy, there definitely not as bad as Indigos! They definitely poop quite a bit, I'd say my 18in. female cocinnus has approx. 6-8 stools per week. Since I use the Carefresh, I just pick out the stools and then three times a month change the entire thing out. As far as a recomended subspecies/morph/ect......it's all a matter of personal choice, availability and cost. All the T.sirtalis subspecies (Common gartersnake) do very well in captivity and are available as captive bred animals; T.radix (Plains gartersnake) is another good choice if you want something with a bit more meat on it and theres a ton of morphs of this species too, and then there's T.marcianus (Checkered gartersnake) in both normal and albino that's always popular and good looking. Hope this gets you started and feel free to ask any questions here, there's a lot of us with all kinds of good advice and knowledge.

Roy