St Augustine can go down any day of the year. When it is dormant you have to be careful not to move it around until it comes out of dormancy and the roots start to knit into the underlying soil. If you now have a lot of sun, get Floratam St Augustine. It loves the sunlight. You only need to water it once a week in the summer heat. Mulch mow at the mower's highest setting and fertilize on Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving. Put the sod down now, water it 3x per day for 2 weeks until the roots grow into the underlying soil, and mow when the grass is 5 inches high. Mow it back to 4 inches (mower's highest setting).

You should be fine planting Moonbeam in early fall, just make sure it is in a somewhat dryish spot if you garden in clay, perhaps a little high, and not somewhere where the melting snow runs off. I have two large clumps, one in a regular mixed perennial bed & the other with daylilies. The first clump is over ten years old. I find that Moonbeam likes rich soils, but needs to be dry in order to winter well in the cold here. It also needs to be rejuvenated every 3 years or so as it seems that its long bloom seems to deplete the soil somewhat. (I lift them, split them up a bit, replenish the soil, & replant them in the same spot, or as I did once, use some to start another clump elsewhere). Moonbeam does get a late start for me in spring & it is easy to mistake it for grass or weeds, so mark it well. I also tried Baby Sun & Tequila Sunrise (a variegated variety) late last summer and they both wintered over well in a raised bed & have bloomed heavily for me this year as they did in their first year. Creme Brule was planted last year in the spring between some established daylilies & wintered over, but it is still too new to tell if it will be a long lasting perennial. I'd also wait till next spring to plant most other varieties of Coreopsis. Early Sunrise has wintered over for a couple of years in my garden, but its survival/return is always iffy here. IME, if you plant 3 to 5 plants, one or two won't return the first year, several will live a couple years and one, if you're lucky, will persist for 4 or 5 years. They do bloom for a long time, with larger blooms than the others I mentioned, so it's a tradeoff, depends what you want. I only tried Zagreb one time. I fall planted. It returned but never flourished, seemed to be stunted, perhaps from planting late & I finally removed it after a few years. Other gardeners I know have had no problems with it at all. As someone said, the really pretty newer varieties of pink coreopsis are annuals here. However, I have had some luck with rosea. It is a spreader, doesn't really clump for me, & unlike most coreopsis it prefers consistently moist soil. It seems to like the moist lower edges of my daylily bed. Be warned, however, it is a pale bluish pink which does not go well with peachy pinks. I have it planted with Cerise Queen Yarrow (behind on higher drier ground) around some small orchid daylilies (Siloam David Kirchhoff) at the front of the bed. A very pretty combo when it works - the dl sometimes bloom too early, while both the CQ yarrow and C. rosea are mid to late summer bloomers for me. Ah well...:~) that's gardening!

Ooh, soil was perfect tilth today. I had to fight with myself not to do more than pull the weeds and turn the soil deeper to bring up more clay and work in the lime I put down before the snow. Over the last two weeks I've had the tree work done. 91 trees dropped and 22 more were dead-wooded. All the pines are gone which is going to make for a brighter opportunity for landscaping and more room for the existing hardwoods to spread their canopy evenly.

Now that you mention it Ken, I did have excellent luck with my first dozen Olive Branch, many years ago... then got a set a few years later from Walters that didn't ever show the same vigor and the first batch... so I'm one of those that has felt that they may have gotten a weaker strain at some point in the tc process. I've always thought that when you choose a particular eye for tc, and if there is a little genetic flaw or instability in that particular eye from that particular part of the crown - that it would be relatively easy to create a whole strain of thousands of plants that may resemble the true-to-type plant but with something just a little off - vigor, size, color...