Coleus are excellent in floating islands as well. They love the moist soil and bring colors and shapes you just don't get in other water plants. I haven't heard of them in the pond, but in California I guess its worth a try, unfortunately iowa isn't as kind to the plants.

You have to type in the title of the article in the search function to get there, but it was an interesting read. I particularly think we all need to know that many of the plants now produce sterile seeds. That is a good thing re invasive plants but a bad thing if you want to collect seeds, especially vegetable ones. Root, in that seed list I posted from NARGS, did you notice that the wild collected seeds had the site from which the seeds were gathered? I try to request seeds from areas in which the horticultural features mimic NC's Piedmont. So many plants we purchase are now grown from tissue culture. There are positive things about this action, but it also means a "sameness," perhaps no chance of random sports. T. Avent buys tissue culture starts for many things, but most of his expensive plants are grown out the "hard" way, thus his very high prices. On the other hand, tissue culture has made possible lady slipper orchids at what some may think a reasonable price...still a little too pricey for me to chance growing them...but I love seeing them in his new catalog, which just arrived at my house yesterday. Happy New (Gardening) Year to all.

Good advice. I never install the surface-mounted types of vent hoods that were used in your installation for just that reason. Ice/water membrane will normally help protect against ice dam melt water intrusion, but with your hood being that high up it's probably above the membrane. Somewhat unrelated, yet related...a house I built two years ago, the owners called me up in late January with "a huge, huge, problem". They still have a blanket of snow on their roof, it's been there since the first snowfall in December. Meanwhile, all the neighbor's houses have had snow come, then melt off the roof, then more snow, then again another melt off to expose a clean roof. I drove them around to a few other houses in town that I've built, all my roofs are holding snow. Took them a while to comprehend that it means that the heat they're paying for is staying inside the thermal envelope of their house and not going, literally, "through the roof". The good news is you've identified the problem and it'll be easy to rectify. Good on you for identifying the problem.

Thanks for posting Raven. I was out of the country the day of the original post so am happy that it was brought back up to the top with comments. I take hundreds, if not thousands of photos a month and use Picasa every single day I'm not on the road traveling. I love the program and know it inside out. And while I fully understand that I will be still be able to use it, I am disappointed that there will be no further improvements on this great and easy to use app. I upload my images to Flickr, with only my mobile images uploading to Google Photo. In my mind, Google Photo is a much better alternative to Apple's iCloud as it allows me to delete images from my phone to free up space without deleting them on iCloud as well (at least that's what I've read will happen. Hopefully Google will offer an app similar to Picasa with some much needed upgrades. Jodi-