That is too bad. We warn and warn and warn against spring seeding but you know who gets all the attention? The magazines and TV that put on a full court press to get your seeding done in the spring. What kills me is the availability of bermuda grass seed in March in my area. Bermuda is a HOT season grass and seed will not sprout for months after it goes on sale. Now that it is hot as blazes here, they have put the fescue blends on the shelf. In San Antonio??? Puh LEEZE! Yes you only thought you had done all your research. It always pains me to find out I overlooked something really basic that everyone else seems to know. Like, How did I miss THAT? Grass1950 got it right with the one step forward and two steps back. It is heartening to see you have a positive attitude toward a second reno in the same year. I would say your lawn as is has a shot at recovery but it will not be until this time next year that you see the results. If you reno again in August, you can have it looking pretty good by October. KBG is one of those ground covers with the following characteristics: The first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, the third year it leaps. Have patience and you will be rewarded. 1. Find the seed you want. Check the NTEP trials for your state and area to see what they like. Lean toward those but don't necessarily commit yet. Look at previous years trials for other varieties. Some are more readily available and perhaps the newer ones offer only marginal improvements. With seed you usually get what you pay for. You should pay more for seed with 0.00% Weed Seed and 0.00% Other Crop. There are a few pesky grasses with seeds the size of dust that can create the wrong lawn if you get them in your seed. Look online for seed suppliers and ask here about actual human's experiences with the vendor. Please don't look at anything that has rye seed in it. The reason takes a lot of words but suffice it to say it sprouts quickly and gives you false hopes as to your new seed. 2. If all you have is annual weeds, then don't respray the RoundUp. Just rent the power rake and set the blades to shred right at ground level. Some places the blades will not hit the ground. Don't panic. Shred the existing weeds and grass and blow or rake it all up. Then reevaluate your surface. You will still have some low spots and high spots. Use your judgement to lower the blades another 1/4 inch to dig up and shred the rest of the plants in the low spots. With this run you will also shred the surface of the high spots loosening the soil. Try to remember where the high spots were and hit them a little harder to loosen more soil. Then use a carpet or something big and relatively heavy to drag around and move the loose soil into the holes. The carpet will have enough horizontal structure to not fall into the holes itself and remove the soil but it will pull loose soil in. Drag that carpet every which way until you are happy with the way it looks. Then water it to settle the dust. I should say that you will suffer the ill effects of rototilling for 3 more years as your soil settles. Consider this a training session for the ultimate leveling you might do in 2015 or so. The reason you had bumpy soil in the first place was because someone rototilled. It is possible to have putting green perfection even at home. Check the archives here to find more on leveling the lawn. 3. Scatter the seed. Roll the seed down with a water fillable roller (rented). The purpose is to get good contact between the seed and soil. It is the soil against the seed that keeps the seed from drying out. Covering the seed with top dressing is too random. You can have large areas that don't take because the covering was too thick. Just roll it. KBG takes a looonnnnggg 3 weeks to come in to the 80% mark. Keep the moisture on as you did before for the entire time. Don't be tempted by early sprouts to back off on watering yet. At 3 weeks you should be approaching 80% germination which is about all the seed producers guarantee. 4. Once the seed is up, you can start thinking about adjusting your mowing height (3 to 3.5 inches for KBG). You can start thinking about backing off on the frequency of watering. Normal for the fall is to apply a full inch once a month. Don't apply 1/4 inch per week or 1/30 inch per day. Apply it all in one day. The reason for that is, remember how you water for new seed (every day), that is what weed seeds are looking for. Once again I need to warn you that the annual weeds you saw in August were summer annuals. There are also winter/spring annuals that you will not see. Those plants will sprout along with your grass but will not show their heads until spring. For the most part we lovingly call those wild flowers but they are traditional weeds. They are annuals and will die in late spring. Again, don't panic. Once your grass is in in the fall I believe you can apply a preemergent herbicide (not corn gluten meal) to minimize the spring weeds. You can also fertilize with organics and even chemical ferts in the fall. Tiemco will be along with more specific help on that. 5. What you want to do in the fall is get your new seeds up and mowed a few times. This will prepare the roots for the summer heat next year. You want to get it as dense as possible for 1-year grass. That density will protect your lawn from weeds of all kinds next season. 6. Early next spring you will be tempted by all manner of advertising to apply fertilizer early. Please resist. KBG will put on enough growth in the early spring that pumping it up with fertilizer is not needed. Wait until after the early flush of new growth to apply the first app. Think in terms of Memorial Day for now. You sound like someone who is going to take this lawn pretty seriously. If so you should go ahead and get a soil test at Logan Labs in Ohio. For $20 they give a much better test than any university or county extension service. Post your test results here and you will get help as to what to add and where to find the additives.

I have about four or five homestead verbenas planted on the side of my driveway. The area is heavily mulched with cedar mulch. I will admit to not fertilizing them since I planted them. But two years later, they are pretty much the exact same size as when I planted them. Now the first year was the horrific drought of 2007 and then last year, they weren't fertilized. Is that why, they haven't spread like everyone else is suggesting they do? I'll be planting them in an area that is not mulched, it will just be the soil that I bring in. TIA. OOOHH, I like the idea of an annual vine. How would sweet pea do? I always discounted it thinking it would need a trellis. Honestly, the area is so ugly now, that even if I put one measly plant there it would be an improvement. I am not familiar with it, but I would gladly take you up on your offer for some heliotrope starts. Thank you. I'm not familiar with wine cups? And, I thought I remember reading, again no personal knowledge, that the Georgia blue veronica likes to be moist. I was hoping for something, that once established, was more drought tolerant. Cameron (love your blog BTW), I thought about the Creeping thyme but I bought some for my sister last year, (she's in MA Zone 5) and she said that all of them died. But when I look at the pictures of it, I just fall in love with it. Perhaps, I'll look in to that also. I want to thank everyone for their helpful advice and I thank my lucky stars every day for this site. Even if I can't offer advice, I just love reading all the posts when I have the time. Once, I have made my decisions, I promise to update everyone. And now that I have a bit more time on my hands, one in Kindergarten, maybe I'll even do some before and after pics. TY!

It may be mugwort, Artemsia vulgaris. Here is a link that might be useful: mugwort

actually shockingly the python snake thing is almost a bust, they had a hunt & round up and only came up w a couple hundred this past spring. considering the press on it I honestly thought they would be hauling in thousands! I keep saying if they are finding tons of exotic snakes what is happening to the skins from killing them and why are the prices on snake skin goods not going down LOL. The snail thing is a problem for waterways as are several new pests in south FL that affect AG. Alot of these pests come in on plant material that is started off-shore which is where MOST of the tropicals, annuals & perennial plugs are coming in from. Sometimes new pests & diseases can be attributed to hurricanes or big storms but mostly it is due to humans importing them in some fashion. You do not ever want to try and come thru South FL from outside of this country, especially from a tropical area and try to bring in on your person or luggage a fruit, seed, cutting, plant or food they catch most of those people LOL. Agriculture is a multi-billion $ industry here, we value it above any other form of revenue, you don't mess with it! YUP believe it or not, nearly every plug plant in those categories in this country is originally grow outside of this country and either flown in or barged in. We do 100,000 1 gal perennials a week & every single one of them is started offshore and overnighted to us. All of our annuals are done that way too. The only plants we self propagate is our woody's and we do our own cuttings, close to 500,000 a week and those plants take close to 2 yrs to be sellable. As soon as something new is found it literally takes only hours for 75% of this industry to find out about it, start checking our material and notifying the authorities. ~ liz