I am not at all qualified to address your questions. What I see is a beautiful setting, but I also see some landscaping challenges in the form of: - A windy plain - Red clay - probably very lean soil - HOT, dry summers with little or NO rain - Harsh winters - Neighbors whose properties do not offer attractive views for you. Question: Will there be more properties built around yours? Is is possible that someone else may build between you and that gorgeous butte? (It is a butte, isn't it?) People at this forum may be able to provide some general guidance that will help you come up with an overall plan, but for specific plant suggestions, you may be best served by consulting a local landscape professional. I have also linked a list of Utah native plants from the University of Utah website. To make it easier for others reading this, I am pasting a few of your pictures here: The setting: Front of house: Garage on left side: Right side: I'm guessing that you may want to block the view of these neighbors: Here is a link that might be useful: Utah native plants

He is of mixed origins. I got the eggs from a neighbor. The hen (can't remember the breed) has feathers on her legs and is a real sweetheart, that being a dominate trait he has a few feathers on his legs - just enough to be ugly. I'll have to check to see what the rooster possibilities were at the time. One possibility that I know could have been a Rhode Island Red. (I gave away the Rhode Island Red out of the same hatch, gave away the wrong bird - I see him occasionally and he's a good rooster.) Our daughter is home this weenend from college, if she has her digital camera with her I'll take some pictures of him. He eats out of our hands - all summer when I'd find a worm or grasshopper I'd yell bug and he'd come running to eat it out of my hand. At this point he is not the least bit aggressive to anyone or anything except the little girls. When he is finished with his business the poor things don't have a feather left on their necks and he claws out the feathers on their backends and as soon as he is finished with one he goes to another and then another. I haven't had the courage to leave him in there long enough to see if he ever plays out. Our game rooster is such a gentleman when it comes to his hens I suppose I expect all roosters to act the same way. I'm off to look at your page. Thanks

Bestlawn: The local Lesco dealer. I also used their starter fertilizer which I had success with last year. I put it down in the Fall with new seed (afer core aeration) and the lawn came up early ...like it was in Ireland in the Spring. I don't know why, but it was a dramatic green color, as though the root system had stored the nitro. over the winter. Maybe I was just heavy handed with the Fall application of starter fertilizer, but a lot of people were dropping their jaws when it greened up to bejesus two weeks before any other lawn around here. Thank you for all your great advice here.

I haven't seeded any monostands of sheep fescue, so I'm not sure what it looks like. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between wheatgrass and KBG (even KBG that is newly sprouting from the roots/rhizomes). The natives will be much lighter in color than the KBG. A word of warning on the spots that have been going brown during drought. Streambank wheatgrass deals well with drought, but it does so by going in and out of dormancy easily. So if the streambank wheatgrass is the dominant grass, you'll still get some browning. The sheep fescue and western wheatgrass deal with drought by developing extensive root systems, so they don't go dormant as quickly. I've got sections of heckstrip that get almost no water at all from the sprinklers, which means almost no water from mid May through August or September, since we're pretty rain free then. The sprinklers probably hit those spots before the mailbox went in, but the mailbox (community, so I can't just get rid of it) creates a dead spot. The streambank wheatgrass grows there, but goes dormant. Western wheatgrass stays green, but I haven't been planting enough of it so far (from now on, I'm skipping the streambank and going with western). Near the end of the summer, I planted some blue grama, hand watering until it sprouted. It's been doing pretty well. I've read that it's normally a bunch grass, but that it can spread slowly at higher altitudes (I think that's comparative, so we'd count). I was walking the dog earlier today and walked by a section of mostly dirt by a highway. It obviously gets no water other than the rain and snow. There was a lot of dry grass, and some green that looked like it might be western wheatgrass. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the distinctive "eyebrow" seed heads of blue grama. I doubled back to make sure, and there were several tufts of blue grama, green without any water other than the rain we got the first week of June and the first week of September. I'm tempted to sow more grama throughout the lawn, but I want to wait to see how early it goes dormant, since it's a warm season grass. If it has a long enough season, I may start including more of it in my lawn.