Nobody has responded yet so I will give it a try. Go to Garden Junk Forum on this site & look at post called "Unexpected project" They lady is making a spot to sit & enjoy in memory of her mother. She shows before & after she has gotten started & I think it will be nice. She does have a new bench sitting there, most of us are thinking we would find an "old headboard from curbside on trash day, yard sale or thrift shop! We like to reuse things, so everyone recycles. You could put your fire pit out there, plant some native plants from somewhere else on your property so water requirements are low & if you want it cozy put up a branch fence in L shaped maybe 8 ft on each side. Just upright posts & branches attached to them for very rustic look(it is just the look, not a solid fence) since you have some property you should find what you need by looking around. Can wire branches onto posts as it rusts it will look rustic. The "fence" takes away the "sitting out in the middle of "nowhere" feel"! Makes your spot a destination. 1 person suggested to someone planting tree hunks as fence to use 1 near the seat. Good idea, might want to bring along a cold or warm drink & "sit a spell" then you have place to set it. Kirkus just brought up the Inspiration Album that Purplemoon put together for us & if you click on that blue link at bottom you will see many great ideas for great sitting spots. You might go to wooden album(albums listed off to the right side) & there will be bed seats & all things wood, vignettes shows spots people have made in their gardens to enjoy. Hope you get some great ideas from the album- we all love it & saves a lot of time looking for a post that may no longer have the pics. Good Luck

Kara, barred owls are a...ready?...HOOT to listen to, aren't they? With their very loud, "Who cooks for you, who cooks for YOU-aaaaallll?" And then the cackling battles they get into...reminds me of laughing hyenas in the African bush. They are very easy to call up, too. I have known people who could do a perfect call, and even I can call them, though my rendition is far from perfect. But I have had them answer me many times, and come swooping in to see if there was a strange owl in their territory that needed to be investigated. They are the only one of our owls that are often active in full daylight, and they are the only one with black eyes instead of yellow. They are big owls, and the lack of "ear" tufts makes them easy to tell apart from a great horned owl. They are definitely my favorite one. Except possibly for the cute little burrowing owls in the Cape Coral area. Glad you are enjoying them. They sure do spice up a summer night, don't they? Marcia

Not at all, that's what we are here for :-) On your feet--- fine! Many people tried to dissuade me from using this surface for that reason, but done properly it feels just fine on the feet. Because we have snakes and spiders I usually wear garden clogs when I am out there working though. Stones are more in a range from a quarter inch to inch an a half. There is no epoxy, the process is this:. Concrete, at least two inches, is poured over your existing surface. Then pebbles are dumped in it and mixed with big spreaders (squeegee looking things) until they are pretty evenly distributed. Then they kind of disappear. Within eight hours (I may have that wrong, mind, my memory...) someone comes back with a pressure washer and "knocks down" the top crust of the drying concrete to expose the aggregate just under the surface. Then it just all dries in place. They come back and make construction cuts for expansion after it is all hardened. I'll be honest---The draining concrete slurry off this project is a huge mess, it has to go somewhere and if it gets out in the yard and solidifies you'll have little chunks of porous concrete everywhere, so you have to further denature that liquid concrete by watering it down even more wherever the slurry ends up. A lot of it went down our existing drains and caused damage that then had to be repaired (see above). However, the contractor who did this job was a complete idiot (in addition to some things he did wrong and underestimated, he knocked down one of the brick pillars on our bridge because his truck / trailer combination was too long to make the turn off the bridge to continue on the drive and it was perfectly obvious that would happen to anyone observing the truck and turn radius with the most rudimentary knowledge of physics and geometry, not from books but just from being alive) and I would hope your contractor in Fla would be much better at this!

Here in rural southeastern MA I'm seeing a lot of red-winged blackbirds, grackles, and cowbirds; a few Baltimore and orchard orioles, catbirds, starlings, blue jays, tufted titmice, chickadees, downy woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatches, song and white-throated sparrows, goldfinches, cardinals, and mourning doves. The wild turkeys are mostly in the woods, presumably nesting, but there are a few juvenile toms running around and an occasional hen. Gray and red squirrels and chipmunks. Still waiting for the resident hummingbirds (ruby-throats). Claire edit note: I have a varied assortment of feeders and ground feeding areas.