I disagree with Auteck's recommendation, and I'm a little surprised he recommended what he did. Your original grass seed mix selection was tall fescue, fine fescues and KBG. I suspect you have mostly tall fescue growing since you have bare spots. If the KBG in your original grass mix had germinated fully, then it should fill in bare areas in the sunnier parts of your lawn. I agree with him in that perennial rye is usually what is grown in your area, but there was no perennial rye in that original mix. Overseeding your lawn with it now will give you some throughout the whole lawn, but the bare spots will be all PR, and they will stand out against the TF you have now. My advice, use either all TF to overseed, or a mix that has similar percentages to your original mix. I would also stick with Pennington's as it is usually the best mix in the big box stores.

The neighbor ... told me that the previous homeowner never watered the grass. Never. 5 years. This is important information (you were holding out on us ;-). This hints strongly that he let nature takeover in the back, too. The gray grass in the front is dead. That's what dead grass looks like. You don't need to remove it. If you can find a garden center with some Floratam St Augustine, you could put a couple pieces of that in come spring time (Lou can you post a picture or two showing the Floratam coloration so he/we can recognize it when we see it?). You could remove the grass where you place the flats only if you aren't going to completely cover the area. If you 'checkerboard' the grass in, you'll have high and low spots which make mowing a spectator sport. If you only put in a few flats, then hoe out the areas where the new grass goes to lower it about 3/4 inch to the depth of the soil that comes with the new grass. When I said St Aug would spread 10 feet in all directions, I'm talking about runners, not thick, dense turf. But in 2 years you should have pretty nice turf. I easily get 10 feet of runners into my wife's flower beds every year (snicker). Water is the important thing to us. Rain is 10x better for our grass than tap water. Of course mine gets fertilizer on the national holidays. Liquid molasses is much cheaper by any measure. To make 50 pounds of dry molasses they spray 5 pounds of molasses over 45 pounds of fluff. Five pounds of molasses costs them about $0.50 and the fluff costs nothing. The application rate for liquid is 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet. At the garden centers it's about $15 per gallon. At a farm co-op it could be as little as $1.00 per gallon if you bring your own bottle (I use a laundry soap bottle). Yes fireants do not like sugar so spraying sugar over the entire lawn will keep them away. If you are going for the neighborhood gold you can easily do that with an organic plan. Your neighbor may not believe that, but I've seen it done and you will have spent only a fraction of what he spends to make his look that good. Water deeply and infrequently to keep weeds away and develop a deep root system; mulch mow at the mower's highest setting to keep weeds away and to develop a very deep root system; (am I sounding redundant?); and fertilize on the national holidays.

Thanks Don. I will wintersow the seeds and hopefully have a nice crop of new plants next spring. I already feel like expanding the front bed so that I will have room for the Echinacea paradoxa, Eryngium yuccifolium, Prairie Dropseed, and Big Bluestem that I will be wintersowing as well. Scottyboi I will take some photos once the plants put on some size. The grasses for the most part were gallon sized or larger but the milkweeds and Echinacea pallida were in small 4" pots so they will take a while before they look like much. Mike

I don't like to put people off making wild crosses -- you never know what might succeed. In this case, though, I think it would be more productive to try some selective breeding -- while pollinating some of the Sisyrinchium flowers by Irises, just in case. Selective breeding can be as simple as crossing among a few different strains of S. bellum (if you can find different selections) and raising as many seedlings as you can in the space you have available. Look for any variants with longer or broader petals than average. Save these, cross among them, and destroy the rest of the plants that didn't measure up. In the next generation you may see some improvement, but repeat the selection process and cross among the best for a few more generations. In this way you should be able to increase the flower size significantly. A friend of mine did this with Four o'Clocks and doubled the size of the flowers in a few generations. If you feel more adventurous, try crossing with other species of Sysyrinchium. Karl Here is a link that might be useful: Sisyrinchium species