My problem with the garden is every flower seems white. Need some color. The foliage looks nice. Flowers though to me are secondary to texture and foliage color, which in this garden is pretty good! I myself would not move the grass or sedge whatever it is. It makes the texture change. My garden is wild with overgrowth. It seems with perennials I'm always thinning them. Another suggestion is flower type, I don't see anything with spikes. You want different flower forms. Maybe a daisy form flower too. Irises etc. If you like the white look fine, but I myself would add silvers or silver foliage, or pastels would look great! Another consideration is early, mid, and late flowering plants. So it looks good all season. I myself am still experimenting, I doubt I will ever actually ever finish but keep changes things. Plus the fun of growing new plants. I have a flair for the unusual. My porch is full of tropical's, trees and plants like Pony Tail palm, Yucca tree, night blooming jasmine, etc. I have bamboo and cacti in the ground too. Some forms are winter hardy. It doesn't look typical! It looks eccentric, but I'm very much so! Mostly though I grow edibles and I'm into edible landscapes. I want to grow as many ornamental edibles as possible besides your normal garden. So edible dogwoods, June berries like Autumn Brilliance. Red leafed peach trees Weeping plum trees. A currant cordon on the fence, I like edible vines like Eastern Magnolia. Edible wild flowers are in the garden too. Strawberry and raspberry ground covers are next to be put in. Yes some raspberries are ground covers. I also grow regular raspberries too, I have 15 plants. I get 25-50 berries daily for 4 months. I have Pluots, and a Spice Zee Nectaplum. Indian Free peach that Thomas Jefferson grew. It is pretty much a jungle here! Many plants are small give me a few years, and I will show photos. It's still under construction. This post was edited by Drew51 on Thu, Oct 10, 13 at 10:09

My experience (long ago) with "bagged topsoil" is that it is mostly cr*p. The Scotts name might, however, assure some quality. "So called" topsoil is likely to be an accurate description. I agree that you need to just mix compost into the topsoil you already have. I don't think peat moss will really serve any purpose, unless you're trying to lighten up clay. It's pretty pricey as well.

The finish has been compromised and you are looking at raw wood. You will need to have this fixed sooner rather than later (you have a few months to do it). Whether you need a full sand and refinish or spot patching, will be up to the professional flooring refinisher and what s/he sees throughout the REST of the floor. For instance, if 90% of the floor is in AMAZING SHAPE (because it was refinished only 5-7 years ago), then a spot-fix is the option you want to look at. If 90% of the floor is in less than decent shape (because the finish is more than 15 years old and it is coming up on it's required sand/refinish event) then the spot finish isn't ideal - in fact it could be a waste of money. I can't tell how the rest of the floor looks, but by the photos it looks a little dry or "thin". When was the last time the floor had a full sand and refinish? Was it 7 years ago, 17 years ago or 27 years ago? Somewhere in your answer will tell you which is the best way to go.

But [a surfactant] does NOTHING to reduce or counteract compaction! It cannot recreate pore space. This is a well-recognized concept with any soil scientist as is fully explained by soil physics. You cannot fully explain soil science with physics or even physics and chemistry, as any soil scientist can tell you. Pores are created by roots, worms, fungi, arthropods, and microarthropods, not physics or chemistry. Once the surfactant restores percolation and allows water down to where the soil temperatures are cooler, the environment changes to favor the biology, and the biological population explosion does the work of opening pores in the soil. Somehow [home gardeners] meager anecdotal experience makes them more knowledgeable than specialists in the field. How does that work?? So you're dismissing the numerous university studies of surfactants already done (many years ago), showing that they are as effective as core and tine aeration? How does that work? Here's how home gardener dismissal of your phantom science works. You don't have the science you claim to have. For whatever reason(s), the specialists refuse to spend 50 cents to try an experiment on their lawn. Perhaps the reason is that they only do science when someone else pays for it. We're willing to pay for it ourselves. Big Shampoo has yet to realize their products are being used in the garden, so they have not funded the universities to quantify the results. Even when scientists try to make things work, you can end up with the Iowa State fiasco regarding corn gluten meal as an effective organic preemergent weed control. For those who read the research instead of the marketing, their research shows the best they could do was 80% weed control, and that was not repeatable. Eighty percent still leaves a yard full of weeds even under their ideal circumstances. Then they patented the product and we have to pay more for CGM than we used to. So basically we home gardeners are trying things that the universities have not tried (yet). We are not necessarily more knowledgeable, but we might have more experience with some ideas then they are. When we find something that seems to work, we farm it out to our peers for review...our peers being other home gardeners. We don't have the resources to do a large scale, randomized, double blind, placebo controlled, project. All we have is peers. So ours is not scientific evidence, but when a few peers adds up to lots of peers having success, then we might throw it out there for others to try. I'm not calling the Earth flat. I'm trying to help solve a problem common to lawns. Are you a scientist with clear scientific evidence, clear statistical results, proving I am wrong? You can sit there and postulate things until you're blue in the face, but until you try it and make your own observation, I'm more skeptical of you than I am of those reporting success. Do we make mistakes? Sure. I used to tout ordinary cornmeal as a universal antifungal product for lawns. It turns out cornmeal is not universal, but it seems to work only in St Augustine lawns. It has no effect in cool season grass. I don't have any research, but I have lots of people reporting back with pros and cons thanking me for suggesting cornmeal to recover a diseased lawn.