A little fungicide couldn't hurt! I had some funk on one of my tomato plants and sprayed a couple of weeks ago. All plants look good now. More rain coming tomorrow :-)

Cant really tell by just the lot size. Depends on available yard space and sun exposure, do you want a back yard with space for kids to play in, are there Home Owners Association rules, do you want some in the front yard (ripe fruit hanging on a accessible tree is tempting to potential theft). I don't have any avacodo, but there are some mango trees that can be kept fairly small. You can control a banana mat to just keep three stalks growing to keep it small, lychee can be kept a manageable size. My lot is 120' x 125' (15,000 SF) I have 10 different banana types, 2 different lychee, 5 different papaya, 7 different dragon fruit (6 more in pots to be ground plated next year)), 1 grapefruit, 1 orange, 1 tangerine, 1 lemon, 2 lime, 7 different mango (most in pots), along with pineapples (every top I cut off gets planted somewhere), a couple of tomatoes, 4 eggplants (in containers), 2 blueberry (container), hot peppers (containers), sugar cane, a small mamey sapote, a small carambola. Still planning to have some big pine trees removed to get more sun and planting space. The South side of my house is pretty shaded, that will be changing. Where there is a will there is a way. DM

I also use the socks which are used almost exclusively by goldfinches this year (last year the pine siskins were all over). There's a lot of spillover, which makes juncos and other sparrows very happy. Not to mention the mourning doves, and the turkeys. Turkeys were a big problem when one sock dangled down within reach - the turkeys discovered they could peck a hole in the sock and empty it down to the ground, where they sucked it all up. As for your original question "How much does a single bird eat in a day any way?", I don't know the answer, but I had 18 goldfinches on the socks this morning and they have been diligently working at lowering the levels. Claire

You should be able to make whatever grade changes to your property you want without effecting the wetlands. The only thing you could do to change the wetlands is to dig down 20' and make a pond. If you want to level off a yard, you basically have 2 choices: 1. flatten out your lot by lowering the elevation of your hilltop and pushing the dirt partially down the slope or 2. bring in fill soil raising the rear of your lot. I think you'll be able to figure something out with the existing soil. If you don't have a walkout basement, you will be displacing a good deal of soil excavating the basement - that soil can level off more yard for you. You could also bring down you lot a little pushing the soil back over the hill to expand the hilltop. As long are you leave a slight berm (little hump) at the edges of you lot lines, your neighbors lots won't drain onto your lot. Just be sure to get a cover crop going right away so that your disturbed soil doesn't erode away. Our morain hill top was slightly smaller than our house foot print when we started. We brought down the hill by 7-10 feet and used the displaced soil to further expand the top of our hill. Below is a pic of the topography overlaid on an areal image showing our basement footprint (if you look closely). The lines are 10 foot lines, so it was about 70 feet down to the river when we started (and very steep). It worked fine, but contractors around here are not used to working with steepness. If you do some leveling, make sure that your contractor skins off the topsoil separately to put back on top.