Here is what worked for me. I got most of this advice from this and other forums. Taking up from where you mowed at the lowest setting and bagged the clippings. You should be left with a very low mat that will server to hold the seed in place. Do not till as dchall mentioned (he pretty much knows what he is talking about). Aerating is debatable from what I have read. Some say do not mechanically aerate unless your soil has been compacted by heavy machinery going over it (you can later on start spraying soil conditioner on your soil that will help with opening it up to oxygen and water). It will most likely bring up unwanted weed seeds and give you a lot of seed pressure in your reno. Apply whatever fertilizer (i.e. starter fertilizer. I did half rate at seeding and half rate about 30 days later) and sow the seed. Mid Sept is about right for your location. I seeded during the third week of Sept last year in NC. Play it by ear. As mentioned, when you see the temps coming down and maybe some rain coming then time it just right. Sprinkle about 1/8 � � inch of compost over the top of the seeds. This is the time consuming part. This will also help hold the seed in and help with seed soil contact. It made a noticeable difference in seed germination for me where I did it and where I did not. Where I did not I had to apply more seed later. Water appropriately. Very important.

Yes, all-too-common a mistake. You're not the first or the last. Roundup is a systemic herbicide. It is absorbed by the leaves and travels throughout the plant to kill the tops and the roots. You have very little time to wash it off before it gets absorbed. I don't know how much but the 20 minutes cited above sounds reasonable. Roundup does not itself cause rapid growth but it works faster and more thoroughly when growth is rapid. We sometimes add miracle gro to our roundup mix to enhance its effectiveness. So - as mentioned above: do NOT fertilize your sprayed roses!!! The advice to prune off sprayed branches is good too but it would have had to been done right away, before the roundup traveled to the roots. Roundup is not active in the soil at all. Don't worry about that part. I looked up Roundup for Poison Ivy and it also contains triclopyr, the active ingredient in Garlon and Blackberry n Brush killer. This is also systemic and is a powerful woody brush killer. I think I'd be more worried about that than the roundup. I use a lot of Garlon at work to kill invasive shrubs, and in spring when things are actively growing, the rinsate from the empty sprayer can still kill things. That means that when I'm done spraying, I rinse the empty sprayer with plain water and spray it out on more of the target brush and sometimes that's enough to kill them. I am crossing my fingers for you! A note to all about pesticide safety: always always always keep separate sprayers and measuring implements for herbicides versus everything else.

We have tons of Bermuda grass, and all I can say is, if you weed it and weed it and keep a heavy mulch on your beds, you can considerably weaken it. My idea is that since Bermuda grass doesn't grow everywhere even in its territory, there are places where it's outcompeted by other plants. So my job is to create conditions that are more favorable to the plants I want to grow than to the Bermuda grass. It is a slow job, and we have so much garden I'm not sure who's going to win. But we have certainly weakened it in zones where it used to grow thickly. I've used the method of covering turf with several (eight) layers of newspaper and covering that with 4"-6" of mulch and leaving it for several weeks, and it works: it kills the grass and you can dig everything together afterwards and make it into a garden bed. I've also done the lifting turf method, and it's much harder and actually less effective. This time of year we get ant nests. I don't like them, but I figure they're probably there for a reason, and I leave them alone if they're not in some really critical spot. I have poured boiling water over a nest that was in the middle of a much-used path, for example (obviously not a nest that was among the roots of a desirable plant). The last couple of years I haven't bothered the ants, nor they me. If the ants did become a problem, I would start looking into what attracts ants, and try to get rid of the attraction. It's not just on account of disease that gardens don't look great absolutely all the time. Come on, are we ourselves necessarily at our most ravishing when we stagger out of bed in the morning to get ready to go to work, or after a bout of flu? Roses are living things; gardens are assemblages of living things. Roses come out of bloom; they get beaten down by a deluge of rain (it happened here this afternoon); they shed their leaves in March to make room for new growth, looking extremely ratty as they do so; they get disease; their flowers are gobbled by beetles; bindweed and Bermuda grass rise through the mulch around their feet. To be alive is to be imperfect. We all try hard to make our gardens as lovely as our knowledge and time and energy will permit, but beauty, real beauty, is still intermittent, always a gift, always a surprise, always a blessing. Serendipity is a garden. Melissa

I bought the 'SpotShot Battery-Powered Sprayer' from Rosemania 3 years ago. It has a 7-gallon capacity sprayer and comes with two different sprayer heads. It is mounted on a 2-wheel cart which is excellent for wheeling around and has 50-feet of hose and a very long wand for hard-to-get places. I paid $399 plus an extra $40 for longer hose. The wand is easy to handle and allows you to reach up to taller climbers and in awkward places to spray. What used to take hours can now be completed in 1.5 hours and then I'm off to other garden chores. The tank is easy to fill and clean; an added bonus. Best investment ever IMO...only had to replace the battery once in 2 years and I use it every 2 weeks. If you have alot of roses, I recommend this sprayer. No more lugging around a hand-sprayer and definitely no more hand-pumping. Here is a link that might be useful: SpotShot Sprayer