I was thinking after I intially posted that you may not have the funds to pave so I remembered how farmers kept cows from grazing off the property. They dug a trench on the drive, and laid pipes across it, since cows don't like walking over pipes. You could stop the flow of water from speeding up and creating gullies at the bottom of the drive if you took some water off the drive and created a swale on either side and lined it with rocks. There ain't a simple nor free solution. It will require some sweat. Here is a link that might be useful: Propagating Perennials

Sit down because I'm jumping right into some science. This is for your husband to help understand why the bridge idea is not going to help you. Normal soil has an open pore structure that allows air and water to pass through it. Inside this structure lives 10s of thousands of species of beneficial microbes which thrive on the open pore structure. These microbes are Mother Nature's invention. As it turns out the species of microbes living in swampy land are different from those living in dryish land (lawns). When you allow standing water to stand for several days, that cuts off the air flow to the beneficial microbes and their populations begin to decrease. If this happens enough, normal grass will thin out and stop growing. They will be replaced by swamp grasses like nutgrass and some others. So it is important to keep the water from pooling on your lawn. Back to the issue... If your community has an ordinance that says homeowners must drain all water from their own property and not allow it to cross over onto a neighbor's land, then all you should have to do is call your city code compliance officers and make them deal with it. If you live in the savage west, then you might have to do it yourself. Talk to your neighbors and ask them to berm up their land at the fence to keep the water on their side. Since they already dug the ditch, they are unlikely to bend to your wishes. So when that doesn't work, berm up your side of the fence and push their water back onto their property (see how they like having standing pools of water!!). Six inches of berm would normally be plenty. Planting a lawn in the spring is not the best idea, but if you really have to you have to. If you can afford sod, then that should be better, but if you were planning to seed, I would not spend a lot on seed for a spring installation. What will happen is all that new grass will find itself competing with crabgrass which also sprouts in the spring. Your grass seed will be less hardy than the crabgrass and will thin out in the summer heat. It is not uncommon to have a full crabgrass lawn by July. It is much better to seed new grass in the fall because crabgrass seed is not sprouting then. It also gives the new grass all winter and spring to develop heat tolerant roots. Now a word on forum etiquette. This is not your thread. The original poster had a problem with soil structure. Your problem is neighborhood drainage. You should have opened a new topic so people who want to help you don't have to read through someone else's problem from last year - which is really not your problem. I also suspect you will need some advice on planting your lawn (spring? or fall - either one). Now is the time to ask, so post a new topic! When you ask about planting a new lawn, please mention specifically where you live. The zone system is not good for helping with lawns, so give a town or zip code. And if you want more help on the neighborhood drainage issue, I would still post a new topic with your new questions. This forum seems to have a lot of opinions about neighbors '-)

My roses always take a break when it's really hot. If they do make any flowers, they are small and cruddy looking, or even fail like your bud that fell off. I would guess this is what is happening with yours - especially with afternoon sun and the kind of heat we've been having on the prairies this summer. Usually my roses look best in June and again in late August.

If you have other flowering perennials and annuals in the garden amongst your roses, you'll likely attract bugs that eat the rose slugs -- in particular, yellow jackets hunt them down. My garden is two years old now, and the worst rose slug damage happened the first year, because I hadn't added perennials yet. Last year, I saw some damage early-on, but not quite as much as the year before, and then I saw very little at all after June. This year, the little I see is concentrated on roses which still don't have non-rose companions -- i.e., areas I'm still filling. You can spray insecticides to kill them, but you may inadvertently kill some of the critters that eat them as well, which can lock you in a cycle of HAVING to spray all the time because nothing else will be around to take care of them. It takes a bit of time for a food source to become obvious to critters that utilize it -- rose slugs didn't appear until I had roses, and bugs that eat rose slugs didn't appear until I had rose slugs. Just something to think about. :-) ~Christopher