Thanks for posting this. I'm going to try to participate this year :-)

Nice! I'm looking forward to spring as well. Here's my back yard. This is last fall after I finished planting the back of the yard. It's on the edge of the property looking toward the house. In the foreground are two nannyberry shrubs (a viburnum related to cranberry) and then an area where I've planted a prairie garden and covered it with compost. You can see where I've left space for a path to walk through, and I plan to put a bench there. Back towards the house there is where the garden starts, and I had started planting there last year. It's nice in the summer sitting out on the patio, where I can watch the bird feeders and enjoy being surrounded by native plants. The area where I'm standing, with the nannyberry and the small post right beyond it, used to be completely infested with buckthorn and many invasive weeds. It took me 2 years to clear it all out. Now that the area is opened up a bit, I'm hoping that I'll have bluebirds nesting again (saw many here during fall migration.) I left this post standing as a spot for the bluebirds to perch, and to hang a nice sign. The post used to be completely obscured by buckthorn.

I don't know anything about Florida, but, my Niece and Nephew gave me some advice, for when i came visiting: DO NOT WALK AROUND IN THE DARK, WITHOUT A GOOD FLASH-LIGHT! And maybe a big stick, too!

I'd give up filtration and sanitization before I gave up the ski pond,LOL!!! I'm a guy who wants his cake for free. During the post hurricane/economic crash down time we've had 3 of my excavators out there to keep my hands busy. I laid the pond out exclusively for a slalom skiing buoy course down the center, a full circle speed lap course, and a multi gate buoys course that will incorporate into the slalom ski buoys. My boys, my buddies, and I could have little (4 boat max) in house races, great practice sessions, slalom skiing, and wakeboarding all in the same arena. I'm hoping my prior corner speed plus acceleration down the straight speed arithmetic will bring us into the east inlet of the channel at less than 60mph on the speed lap course, and more importantly that my concave radius channel has enough water apron to accept a boat coming in a little to hot. These babies will dive to the inside on high speed turns, but can drift wide in another boats wake or froth. This past weekend we were eyeballing the channels apron, target practicing, and shooting skeet. Drinking beer afterwords I told my DS and SIL that I'm not going to allow passing in the channel. They were bummed because no passing violates every rule of racing, passing others is what we live for. I'm going to take some ski's to our local lake in the next week or two and set up some temporary buoys with the inside of my radius at a right angle to the shore, come in hot and start moving the buoys closer and closer to the shore. Hopefully I'll be able to use the info gathered to determine if the channel's OK or if I need to widen the outside of the radius. I didn't mean to sound Anti-Cop earlier because I'm not, but they'll probably come give us static when we set up the buoys. The river authority has never a allowed closed course race on the lake and the cops think the water is only there for boaters who're out for a slow speed Sunday boat ride regardless of what day of the week it is. I'll take some pic's as we progress if anybody wants to see them, I'm hoping to be wrapping up soon and that springtimes rain will fill it prior to Memorial Day's weekend. See ya, Kelly