Wow, thanks for all the great responses. First off, I am in Utah near Salt Lake City (just south). Regarding the length. My cutting it shorter in the fall was kind of a backlash to trying to solve the issue I am asking about. I used to leave it much longer (in the 3" to 4") but the amount of dead material I had to clear out every spring was crazy. The past few years I have tried the shorter blades and I have had much less dead material to worry about and I seem to be able to green up the lawn just as quickly as before (just not as quickly as my neighbors and they don;t seem to have all the dead material). It sounds like cutting it short in the fall may be OK. But I need to immediately go back to the 3" to 4" for the first spring mowing. The reason I tried cutting it so short this spring was because it seems to be getting rid (or mulching) a lot of the dead material. Maybe that was misguided. But if I can get rid of the dead material in the spring, I will also remove my need to cut it short in the fall. Regarding the fertilizing and other chemicals: I wish I had more detail for you. Fertilizing has probably been the thing I have been the most lax about. I have pretty much been buying just seems good at the time. I have mostly been using an IFA mix recently for Lawn and Gardens. I have on occasion used fertilizer that has contained pest control and/or insect control (but I can't remember the specific brands). I use a drop feeder and follow the instructions on the bag for the amount. I most often just spot treat the weeds in the lawn with a hand sprayer and a lawn safe weed killer (I have used several brands). But on a few occasions I have purchased the hose attached variety of pest and weed control solutions. And I have never used a fungicide. This year I gave in and just bought the Scotts four step program to see if I could learn something from them. That's my current plan anyway. Watering wise, the front is on a slope and it seems that if I don't water often, once the heat of summer sets in, I start to get dead spots (we do get temps above 100 often). I have been working diligently over the past few years to make the roots go deep (remember the daily watering of the previous owner). When I need to cut out sections to replace sprinklers and such, the roots do seem to be very deep now. Parts of the backyard (more even, not sloped) do get a lot less water and do fine. I try to do deep soaks less often (I heard a trick once that I should run my zones shorter but run the zone cycles back to back giving it time to soak in after the first run). The standard watering for the neighborhoods (and what the city asks us to limit to) is three days a week. We have pressurization irrigation that is relatively cheap so it seems that most opt for the easier option of watering as often as they can. I have tried to stay well under that when I can. It sounds like I could be even better. Soil quality: I have never had my soil professionally tested. All the nurseries say that we have very alkaline soil that is high in phosphorus. I bought an over the counter soil testing kit this year and tested the soil in my garden. I verified that wisdom: high alkalinity, high phosphorus, high potassium and nitrogen deficient. I did have someone ask me recently if I ever added iron. I have never intentionally added additional iron. It is possible that some of the commercial fertilizers I have used has contained iron (I know one of the steps of the Scotts contains iron). Maybe that's what it needs (or at least in part). I will have to look into the Logan Labs option. Their test looks very complete. Wow, so there it is all out in the open (with some potential over-explaining). Thanks for all the ideas so far. I appreciate you all taking the time to help us less knowledgeable guys out.

Following up, a few months later... Things seem to be back to normal in the garden (thanks again for all of the advice and support). Nothing dead, and even a few new creatures -- a toad (must've come over from a man-made garden pond nearby) and a bunny (an unpleasant surprise -- living in an urban area, this is our first rabbit ever, in four years!). Birds are plentiful, and we're seeing a few goldfinches come by as the coneflowers dry up. I spent the summer enjoying the garden mostly from the inside... next spring will bring a clean slate and I can stop feeling funny about being out there (and about being here). Interesting, though: Like Hyta, I had not one Japanese beetle. Not a one. And I didn't spray anything besides all-season oil for aphids. Saw this in the newspaper today about more dangers from imidicloprid, this time about lingering dangers to honeybees: "Unfortunately, we are learning that Merit has some ugly side effects, namely causing what has been called colony collapse disorder, where thousands of honeybee colonies are disappearing for no obvious reason. Now we know that any plant that is treated with Merit and has blossoms that attract bees, those bees will receive a non-lethal shot of Merit. But it will cause them to lose their ability to find their way back to the hive. It also weakens the bee's immune system so the bee usually dies of some fungus or virus. ... "We yardeners can't deal with the bee problem in agriculture, but we definitely can take a look at how we are using Merit in our own yard. Some of the most effective and popular systemic insecticides for rose bushes have Merit as the main ingredient. Honeybees will always work over rose blossoms and so are exposed to a little bit of Merit -- enough to affect them badly." Provided the link for those of you who want to read more. (P.S. Maryl, I made sure to spray my clothes each time; thanks for the tip. And Joanne, now you must forgive me. I never have any e-mails about responses to a post. Still, please accept *my* apology for not responding sooner to say it's no big deal at all. :) )

Paige, yes you could repot coleus and take it home, but very soon it will be huge and leggy. Also, could you imagine to bring home such monster (easy 4x4')? 3 years ago Abi gave me a 1G pot of it. What you see is the 8th or 9th generation out of it. I already propagated enough cuttings of my favorites, will bring them home and when in December-January they'll be woody again I'll take a new cuttings which will be the actual plants that will go into ground in a spring. Depending on variety's vigor and size, sometimes only third generation will be manageable to keep it till spring. If anyone interested I could bring a lot of fresh cuttings (not rooted) of this one and from 'South of the Border'. Both have good sun tolerance.

I live in Tennessee and really wanted to deal with a Tennessee nursery. It's a good idea to deal locally, I assumed. Maybe not, though. The tnnursery website currently has "Fast Shipping Nationwide" scrolling across the top. So naturally, I thought this would work for me. I could have my guys here in maybe ten days and the trees would be here. Nope. Unbeknownst to you when you order, it takes them 7-10 business days to ship out an order (they don't tell you this until you inquire as to if your trees have shipped). That's two weeks, give or take, before the order is ever put on the truck, then you have 3-5 business days transit on top of that. That's normally not an issue, except when you voluntarily set the expectation that the shipping is "Fast" and "Nationwide". I didn't need the 'Nationwide' part. I'm right down the road. Fast would have been nice, but if they had simply told me prior to ordering what kind of time frame I was looking at, I probably wouldn't have minded so much. But they set the expectation at "Fast" repeatedly, and so looking at other nurseries, who ship within a couple of days of ordering, I thought they would as well. Turns out, their shipping isn't fast. At all. In fact, it's so not-fast, that it may actually be the slowest shipping nursery in the market right now. Without exception, every other nursery I checked into ships faster. They probably get your order correct, too. I ordered the BOGO Free apricot trees, paid for two, so should have received four. I didn't. I got two in total. I ordered trees advertised at 3'-4' tall, and received trees that were 33" tall. When I have ordered trees in the past from other nurseries, they're always very generous with the height of the trees they send you. Order a 5'-6' tree, and you'll almost always get on that's 6 1/2 feet tall. When I called to let them know, the sales department answered, and when I tried to tell them what was going on, I was told that they don't accept phone calls, and that I would have to email someone. So I began emailing them, and received a few responses back and forth over a few hours, which is super annoying to have to constantly stop and restart again. Once I left them a bad review on their own website, someone reached out to me and called. She informed me that they include the length of the root ball in the total height calculation. I was ready for this, having called TyTyGa, Fast Growing Trees, and another I can't remember, all of whom (not only took my phone call) confirmed for me that if a nursery is telling you that they calculate root ball length in overall tree height, that they're probably being not terribly up front with you. In the end, they agreed to send me the two trees that I was short, and credit me with, I guess, a partial refund for the trees that were short, which doesn't help me a lot, since I'm not interested in planting those trees because they're so small. I asked if they could ship out the trees that are the correct height for me, and was told that they would be happy to do so, but only after I sent the short ones back (I sent them photos of the trees with a measuring stick next to them to verify the issues for them), and that they wouldn't send the correct trees out to me until they received the rejected trees, nor would they send me a shipping label. I would have to pay for shipping. I was told that a manager would be reaching out to me, which never happened. My whole planting schedule is screwed up now. I've sent my guys home twice, and they've let me know that I'm back at the back of the list - four weeks out. You got me this one time, but you won't get me again. It's a shame that a local business doesn't care as much about me as I did them. That's how I see it. I'm not asking to be favored, but I am asking to be treated fairly, and this isn't that. FYI, I believe that TNNursery also owns or is owned by Tennessee Wholesale Nursery. Also, pay attention to the positive reviews on this site; they all sound like American names, but the diction is terrible and the English is either from the Indian subcontinent or from China. It seems as though all of the positive reviews have that in common. I'll never do business with them again.