I've read that you are not to clean the fiilter media...ever. I built my own biofilter...not a skippy but I am about to add one due to all the good things I have heard about them. My pond is in the stage of green pea soup also. I have heard it is a stage that ponds go through this time of year. I am trying the quilt batting. I have it in the top layer of my biofilter and it is catching quite a bit of the algae. I purchased mine from Michaels. I also am using it around my pump. I am letting it run two hours around the pump because it gets pretty dirty quickly. This works great to catch all the small algae. You have to be careful to not catch the batting in the pump. I guess we will see how good it works. I'm thinking about building something that would add some type of barrier between the batting and pump to avoid this problem. Probably a project for tomorrow. Good luck! If anyone has good ideas to get the pond clear I am open to the hints as well!

I use a sharpie on the rhizom itself and its last all season. In our moist climate the leaves just put out to much moisture to hold the ink more than a couple of months. By august when I am ready to divide there is just not enough left to read. I also find it easier to make a list of plant names and mark them by thier number on the list some of the names are so big its just hard to fit them on the plant. I usually mark one by name or use a marker then mark the rest that are the same by the number. I got that idea by a iris farm I visited near Shreiners a few years ago. They had a wooden marker with the name and number then the rhuzoms them self were marked with that number.

One more comment/complaint and then I will try to leave it aside for now -- with this new format, every time you open a thread, it opens a new tab or window on your browser. That seems totally unnecessary -- unless every window opened generates revenue somehow, but simply clicking through to another page doesn't, and it creates problems on the viewer's end. Maybe this is all revenue driven redesign, in which case loyals and conversations don't matter as much as a lot of people clicking around trying to find stuff -- at least in the short term.

"Sorry, I meant to say I'm looking for a 'drop in' sink NOT a under counter mount. As of now, we will be doing a laminate counter top. It seems there are a lot more options for a under counter mount." Just because you have plastic laminate countertops does not mean you can't have an undermounted sink. Check out the Karran Edge series, please.