I don't know much about warm season grasses, which probably account for most of the grasses that are grown in zone 8-9 AZ. Depending on where in AZ you are, there are a few cool season grasses that may work. I don't know how well these will match your requirements. Many of these are native and/or unconventional lawn grasses. Cool season grasses: There are five fescues that are adapted to a fair portion of AZ: Sheep, Arizona, Hard, Tall and Creeping Red. All but the creeping red fescue are bunch grasses, although sheep fescue will tiller fairly aggressively if it is mowed. There are also some varieties of tall fescue that spread slowly via rhizomes. Sheep fescue is somewhat blue, but the others are all green or blue green. Two wheatgrasses that can be used in lawns are adapted to at least part of AZ: western and thickspike. Both of these spread via rhizomes. I particularly like the looks of western wheatgrass. Warm season grasses: Buffalo grass and blue grama are both natives that are well suited to most or all of AZ. blue grama is a bunch grass that is very attractive, with fine soft blades. Buffalo grass spreads via stolons (above ground runners). It has a somewhat gray green color to it and may produce a somewhat thin lawn. If you want the lawn to be soft and you choose buffalo grass, make sure you pick a sod or plug variety that is all female. The seeded varieties produce a large seeds in burrs. Most of the grasses I've listed here will live with little additional water. Tall fescue is the only one that will need regular watering.

Susan, I guess I mentioned all the bugs elsewhere and not here....but yes, it is a horrid bug year and I feel that there is a definite connection to the weather. Organic farmers and gardeners in Texas were wrestling with the very same bug outbreaks I had here at about the same time or slightly earlier, so it seems like the outbreaks were weather-related.....like they had potato bugs just all of a sudden one day....none one day, gazillions a couple of days later....and so did I, although I had them about a week later than folks significantly south of me in Texas. The stinkbugs that are eating seeds are new to me but I'm not surprised....stinkbugs are the worst pest on tomatoes and beans at our house every year....them and their relatives the leaf-footed bugs. I had tons of stinkbugs this year but relatively few leaf-footed bugs. You'd think they'd be bad at the same time since they're so closely related. And, as for pleasant outbreaks......we have had the best dragonfly year here that we've had in ages, although we always have dragonflies here. Every time we've had a hard rain that left the ground wet and tons of big puddles, the really big brown dragonflies have held a convention at our place.....there are dozens out flying around the driveway and ponds right now while deer are checking out the compost piles a few feet away looking for something worth eating....a doe and two twin fawns that we've been seeing since July. The cottontail population has really dropped because we have a high bobcat population this year, but I suspect the cottontails will make a recovery within the next couple of months because I've begun seeing some really small ones coming to the chicken pen to scavenge for hen scratch at night and early in the morning. One of the oddest critter anomalies this year.....tons of white-lined sphinx moths everywhere but not a hornworm to be seen in the veggie garden, and no damage on the tomato plants or daturas either. Perhaps they've been eating the native nightshades instead. Robert, You're one of the lucky ones if ragweed doesn't make you miserable! I'm one of the ones who likes cilantro OK. I can take it or leave it. Tim, however, adores it and you have to watch him when he's making fresh salsa or he'll put so much cilantro in it that no one else will eat the stuff. Dawn

You're welcome, Luxrosa. You might as well stack the deck in your favor as much as you possibly can! I saw a great tee shirt yesterday, "I'm not CHEATING...I'm playing by MY rules!" Practicing germinating things BEFORE you create the "perfect rose" is much like that. For years while in school, I worked camera counters in department stores. It used to make me cringe to the floor for people who hit the counter with, "I'm leaving for a month in Europe tomorrow and I NEED a good camera!" Same danged thing! Start something you know nothing about and which requires some acquired skill and practice and isn't easily repeatable. Both are too heavily doomed to fail. Yes, you can repeat the cross. It's been written that Kordes repeated the cross which created Iceberg MANY times and nothing approaching as good a plant as Iceberg ever resulted. How are you going to know if your dream will work if your best chance of success doesn't work because you didn't do it at least well enough for it to have a chance? It's probably going to take you many generations to produce the type of goal you have in your mind's eye. Very often, what you'll see will be small changes at first, so keep a keen eye out for them. It will be interesting seeing how the health of the offspring vary, too. Keep in mind Ralph Moore's admonition..."Create a good plant first, it's always easy to hang a pretty flower on it later." You might also consider creating parallel breeding lines containing what you want to use, plus perhaps some of the better miniatures to help bring the size of the plants, ease of propagation and heavy, continuous repeat flowering back into the equation earlier? First generation hybrid vigor can quickly create some real monsters! For example, if you take a look at what is behind Fairy Moss, you'll find the seminal cross of Pinocchio (3' floribunda) with William Lobb (6'-8' moss) resulted in a 20' moss shrub, from observation of the remaining original plants which grew at Sequoia until its demise. One cross with a miniature tamed the beast to a miniature. Perhaps, if you created some Tea/mini and Alba/mini hybrids, crossing them may result in combining the traits you desire in better plants, more quickly and efficiently? Mr. Moore had discovered minis act like bridges from one section of the family to another, very often increasing the health, vigor, ease of propagation, intensifying flowering and other benefits, along the way. Stripes and moss exist in modern roses today because he was able to bring them out of the Old Garden Roses through miniatures and back into larger moderns. Every striped modern rose traces its origin back to Little Darling and Ferdinand Pichard. His various permutations of this cross, further enhanced by running them through his miniatures, mostly bred from R. Wichurana to improve health, vigor and ease of rooting, resulted in cleaning up many of Ferdinand Pichard's health and vigor issues. You can create similar breeders easily. Select those which have a solid reputation for health and fertility and begin creating hybrids of them with your selected Teas and Albas. Select your hybrids and begin breeding your selections. Engineer in the traits you desire from the foundation so they are more homogenized from the ground up, instead of losing half of them somewhere down the line when you find the need to include other genes to tame the plant, or improve the health, or introduce repeat flowering, etc. Because of moving from a more arid, disease free climate to more of the fog belt last year, I've recently had to rethink and re engineer my own breeder list to improve health. Very healthy, good minis are out there and they are easily obtained. It was never an issue where diseases aren't issues. It IS where they are. Yes, Linda, it is POSSIBLE for foreign pollen to be involved in a self set cross. It just hasn't been shown to be that PROBABLE. Species, wild roses, all have tremendous variation possible within their genes. There are cases of hybridization where they overlap. Species are far more fertile generally than garden roses. Very often, it's because they are single flowers, only one row of petals. That is all that exists naturally without human beings practicing "unnatural selection". Every time you increase a row of petals, you reduce a row of stamen and anthers, reducing fertility. Nature stacks the deck in her favor by not promoting double flowers for very long. They occur, but very seldom last where the single permutation is the more desirable for perpetuation of the species. When those natural hybrids occur, it's also where hundreds, if not thousands, of blooms of the same type are present so the insect pollinator or the wind, is so saturated with the same pollen, it occurs. That would very seldom occur in the average garden where so few of the same rose is grown. If you were a commercial grower, producing hundreds to thousands of the same plant en masse, perhaps. It was common for "breeders" to plant multiple varieties in the hole together in hopes there would be some cross pollination. But, when you read the old rose books and virtually everything raised from those methods was condemned as inferior and nearly synonymous to the originals, it's obvious very little, if any cross pollination occurred. Particularly with the Hybrid Perpetual class, they were sorted by "Types", not just because they grew like the archetype for the section, but very often because they were virtually identical, so if you grew the best, you knew the rest. Grow a bunch of self set seed from any of your garden roses and see what I mean. Most will greatly resemble what they were raised from and many will be inferior. Not all, but the vast majority. You will find variations, and the wider/wilder the cross which created the rose being used for seed was, the wider and wilder the variations will be. If you raise seed from a Hybrid Tea which contains nearly the same ancestors on both sides of its cross, you don't have much with which to work and most are going to come out inferior versions of the original. But, if you look at something like Cardinal Hume, which has a very wide variety of types and classes on both sides of his family tree (yes, some over lap and repetition, but much other different material there to stir things up), you can see why self set seed from him has created such a wide range of results, from dwarf versions to greatly differing colors and plant sizes. It CAN be possible to find interesting things in self set seed, but your best potential comes from roses with such diverse backgrounds, just as they mostly do from deliberate crosses. Trade organizations such as the AARS were officially originally created to prevent the importation and distribution of inferior roses, those similar to but inferior to what was already being sold here to prevent the destruction of the industry. Ellwanger and Foster-Mellier among others, attempted to perform those similar functions, to alert the reader that there was a lot of junk on the market. It has been a continuous problem from the earliest days of rose commerce, both here and abroad, and will continue to be as long as people are willing to take chances on the unknown. As long as you can chalk up the failures and money wasted to "at least I tried", you'll probably have fun. Once you hit the regret that you wasted the time, effort and money, then it's a problem. Fostering the business of providing inferior products and service by monetarily supporting it, voting with our dollars, does hurt everyone and the industry on the whole.

Our Megan used to get all itchy this time of year. She would end up on corticosteroids, which made her nervous and she would pant and just not settle and relax. I hated seeing her like that. A few years ago I took her to a holistic vet. He put her on a predigested dog food and some supplements. One supplement was licorice, one was an auto-immune remedy that was actually made for people. I started her on this treatment at least a month before her seasonal allergy time. It turned out that she became sensitive to that darned dog food with the predigested proteins - just after I bought a second bag of it. She would vomit after eating it. If I remember right, we had to take her in to our own vet to get her looked at for vomiting. So OUR vet says, why not do an allergy blood test? This is the same vet who was giving her prednisone every August and September! He knew we had pet health insurance and would have done anything to help her feel better. So he ran the allergy test and it came back saying she was allergic to beets, potatoes, carrots, and wheat. The way the holistic doctor explained it to us was that if she is allergic to food, that is a year-round thing. If she is not reacting year-round, it is because her immune system was not overwhelmed and was coping with that level of irritation. When you added her seasonal inhalant allergies in August and September, she was then overwhelmed, and the result was skin irritation - which seems to be the most common way that allergies of all types are seen in dogs. So, every summer we would get very diligent about her food allergies, starting in about June. That way, by August she would not be having reactions to her food and would better handle the inhalant allergies that started then. After starting this routine, we were able to control her allergies and keep her comfortable with a Benadryl pill once or twice a day.