Good answers, thanks. I'm sometimes hesitant to get into detail before I know if there are any special circumstances to be aware of. Here is some general lawn care advice I've learned after reading here and other forums over 12 years. This was not what I believed when I first got here. This is the accumulated advice of hundreds or thousands of peoples' experience. Watering Water deeply and infrequently. Deeply means one inch all at one time. Infrequently means no more than once a week when temps are in the 90s and once every 2 weeks when temps are in the 80s. This seems to work in Phoenix and in New Orleans. Of course in New Orleans they can count on rain for all their watering. YOUR grass might need to be weaned into deep and infrequent watering. Start by figuring out how long it takes your sprinkler to put out an inch of water. My oscillator sprinkler with my water pressure takes 8 full hours to get an inch. My neighbor's high flow, in ground system takes 20 minutes. You'll have to figure it out for your set of hoses, sprinklers, and water pressure. Put some tuna or cat food cans out in the yard and turn on the sprinkler. Time how long it takes to fill the cans. That is your target watering time from now on. Every time you water, use that time. Once you do that, start your calendar. Watch the grass (not the weeds) for signs of wilting. When you see the grass turn color to a darker green or the blades folding together, then water for your target time. Restart your calendar. When you water like this several things happen. One is the grass roots will extend and grow deeper into the soil to get the water deeper down. Two is the surface of the soil will dry out completely before you water again. That means new weed seeds will not germinate (they need continual surface moisture). Three is that certain weeds which require continual surface moisture will die out. Mowing Mulch mow at your mower's highest setting or one notch lower. Sounds like you're doing that. But mow once a week. Grass will become stressed if you mow more than 1/3 of the length of the blade off, so weekly mowing is recommended if the grass is growing. Sometimes in summer, if you get a hot spell, you can let the grass go for several weeks. Longer grass needs less water. But when you mow it back, watch for that stress from mowing more than 1/3 off. Fertilizer In your area you should fertilize once in the late spring. Memorial Day is an easy day to remember. If you fertilize when the Scott's commercials come on in March, you will over stimulate the grass resulting in a crash as the grass uses up all the sugar reserves in the roots. The grass will naturally come in at high speed in the spring, so you don't need to do anything until after that fast growth stops. Then the grass needs two more doses of fertilizer in the fall. Labor Day and Thanksgiving are easy days to remember for those. The last app should go down after the grass stops growing in the late fall. Thanksgiving is just a guideline, not a rule. Seeding For northern lawns the best time to seed new grass is in the early fall. Your early fall is August. That gives you time to evaluate the new grass and reseed if you get some thin spots. Fescue grasses will grow down in your little glen in the shade. Both fescue and Kentucky bluegrass will grow in full sun. Many people like the fescue for remaining green all winter, but fescue tends to thin out over the year(s) allowing weeds in. Kentucky bluegrass will turn brown in the winter, but it grows a dense carpet of grass and does not require annual reseeding. You can mix the two grasses if you like. I can't give you specific seed selection advice other than to say you get what you pay for in seed. More expensive seed will have much less of a weed problem. If you look on the label at the guaranteed analysis, you'll see Weed Seed and Other Crop numbers. Those should be zero or close to. Expensive seed will be zero. Hardware store seed will never be zero. This gets down to how much you want to spend. Is lawn care a hobby or a chore? If it is a chore, then go with the hardware store seed. If you want the nicest lawn on the block, then this is a hobby and you could justify spending more up front. Other stuff Aeration is generally not needed. It is very commonly done, but not needed. There are better ways to soften hard soil. Top dressing with soil or sand is NEVER needed unless you need to change your drainage. These materials can be a serious problem if you don't need them. Top dressing with compost is usually only needed if you have chemically poisoned your soil. Organic fertilizer I have been organic since 2002. It really works. Furthermore it seems to have solved other issues I was having with my lawn. The way it works is biological rather than chemical, so it is completely different. You can apply organics any day of the week, or every day of the week, rain or shine, summer or winter, and not have any problems. The only issue people seem to have is the "slow release" feature. It takes 3 full weeks to see the greening and improved density. My current favorite organic fertilizer is alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow) applied at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. You can find it in 50-pound bags at your local feed store (call first). I like them because rabbits are everywhere and they are fairly cheap this year. I scatter them by hand but the should go through a broadcast type spreader. If you can find alfalfa meal, that would be better and would go through a drop spreader. -icides Generally you should not need insecticide or herbicide. A few grubs are acceptable. When you get more than a dozen grubs per square feet, then you have a problem. Usually grubs are a late summer problem. June bugs or Japanese beetles swarm your porch lights in May, lay their eggs at that time, the eggs hatch and the damage begins. By late summer the accumulated damage finally becomes apparent. If you don't see swarms of beetles in late spring, then you likely won't have any issues. If you do, then wait a month and dig a few test holes looking for more than a dozen per square foot. Where you get into needing herbicide is when you put grass seed down in the spring and start watering 3x per day to germinate that seed. Summer weed seeds are germinating at the same time, but only when they get water 3x per day every day. If the soil dries out for days (or weeks) at a time, then you won't get those weeds. Of course Mother Nature has different ideas about when you get water.

Forums are people. Without the people it's just unused software. Each pond forum has a distinct personality driven by the handful of regular posters. Within that group you have the forum royalty, normally just a few people. They post 20-100 times a day, have been a member forever. maybe even a forum monitor. Then a bunch of minions who always agree with the royalty. Getting a kind word from royalty is nirvana. Then a bunch of newbies that post for awhile and leave. Always a new flow of newbies at least in popular forums. And then a sprinkling of trouble makers. You know, the real A wads. People like Dr Eric Johnson who post actual info and disagree with forum dogma. It makes the royalty look bad, exposes their lack of any actual knowledge about ponds. We can't have that! People don't spend 6-10 hours a day posting for 10 years to be dethroned by some johnny-come-lately. First into the attack are the minions... repeating royalty dogma. What they lack in original thought they make up for with sheer numbers and personal insults, pummeling the invader with logic so relentless and mindless the invader can't type fast enough to refute it all. Each response the invader posts only adds to the word twisting and spinning the minions can use against the invader. As the invader starts to tire from the avalanche of nonsense the royalty step in for the coup de grâce. The oh so standard logic used in all forums to shut someone up once and for all... "well I don't know about all that data and science stuff...but I fart in my pond once a day and my pond is great". And with that the invader finally realizes that pond forums have nothing to do with ponds and everything to do with personal kingdoms. And Dr Eric Johnson stopped posting in forums. Many troublemakers like Dr Eric Johnson have been shown the door by self-proclaimed "friendly" members over the years. It's a nasty ugly affair. After the invader has been purged the nice, friendly, members can go back to patting themselves on the back saying what a friendly little forum they have. At least until another troublemaker comes along who dares to question forum dogma. I think nastiness may depend on perspective.

it'll fill in eventually but it will take a long time. You should have watered more frequently. When I started a lawn from seed during spring time, I was watering every 3-4 hours (during day time) @ 5mins each session, any longer is just wasting water since there's no roots to support watering for the long yet. the seeds need to be constantly moist or else they won't germinate. Did you rake the seeds into the soil or put composted manure over it? if you didn't then the seeds could easily blow away from the winds we were getting this past month. Birds could be eating them too if you're not watching them. And also, are your sprinklers giving you a good coverage? I had small bare spots on mine too due to not have a full coverage on my sprinklers (which I eventually fixed) but the grass covered those spots eventually.

Since your seeds were labeled as "North American Natives", it seems like they surely must be natives. Hope so! Usually when you see mixed seeds at a box store, they say "wildflowers" rather than "natives". You may get some plants that you don't like but I think you should go ahead and plant them. You'll undoubtedly get some that you DO like. Orange Butterfly Weed (asclepias tuberosa) is hard to beat. It blooms a long time, attracts butterflies and shows up well from a distance. That one may be in the seed mix that you bought as well as purple coneflowers which I never tire of. Rudbeckia hirta and gaillardias are nice too. Your mix may also contain a lot of plants that won't tolerate hot summers very well. I would love to have a wildflower meadow but have gotten the impression that it's one of those things that's not easy to do successfully, and I've just never tried. I did plant a long mixed shrub/perennial border along one side of our property several years ago and haven't done a very good job at keeping the weeds out. I enjoy it immensely though. I love gardening/wildlife etc. If you're doing it only to save time mowing, you definitely may be disappointed. Otherwise, there's no harm in trying. If your wildflower garden doesn't work out the way you want, you can always collect free seeds from your favorites and start over. Just my opinion but - Since you're in an area of new homes and you may be pressured to have a tidy yard, I think it would make the area look more intentional and attractive to put a section of split rail fence or picket fence across the front to separate it from the rest of your yard. That way your snooty neighbors won't think you're just being lazy about mowing. : ) I would also leave several feet of mowed area between your house and the wildflower patch to make it look neater and so you can easily walk from the front of your house to the back without having to spray yourself with Off every time to keep the ticks and chiggers away. Opinion again - I think you would appreciate having a couple mowed paths through the middle to make it easier to get from one side to the other and so you can see what's growing. Ticks don't hang out in mowed grass nearly as much as knee or waist high areas. Planting shrubs might make it more difficult to maintain. Maybe some others will give you opinions on that. I have trouble with invasive vines, undesirable trees, poke, poison ivy, etc. coming up around my shrubs close to the base where it's hard to remove them. What I think you had in mind is a prairie type area that you can just mow down once a year. Right?