pjb, Sometimes you cannot avoid them though. I know someone who was turning on his faucet and got bit. Someone I used to work with was doing laundry inside her home and reached down to get some clothes and got bit, they figure it came through the dog door. I went to turn the lights off in my garage one evening and turned the corner in my hallway and there was one (I didn't get bit). Several species of rattlesnake will give you the chance to retreat but some like the Mojave green are just plain nasty. In the 20 years we've lived here I have dispatched more rattlers than I care to think about. My 4yr old g-son was less than 1/2 ft from one. Luckily it was injesting and couldn't strike. DH was weeding one winter and touched the back of one- thank God it was lethargic from the cold. I went to get a sweater one night (7/4) from DH's truck- stepped down and heard a rattle. I had to wait in the dark until it rattled again and then I jumped the other way. That was a 3' diamondback- it was less than a foot away. BTW, that 2 year old I posted about last month. The child is Dr. Sean Bush's little boy. Dr Bush who lives about 1/2 mile from us is the ponytail venom doctor from the TV channel Animal Planet's "Venom ER" show. Jude saw the snake in their backyard and tried to pick it up. Dr Bush keeps snakes, spiders, scorpians etc in his garage (well contained) and Jude thinking this was one of his daddy's snakes that got loose wanted to help. If you ever got bit Dr Bush is the man you want to take care of you. In fact he is on call if President Bush (no relation) ever gets bit at his ranch in Crawford.

Larry - I know :( but they were small pups that had never seen the light of day - crispy with dead roots, and where they weren't crispy they were a sick yellow. Yep, trash. vitorama - I must defend myself here lol, I am not the one who put them outside in full sun! That was the friend who I gave them to. She sent me that pic, saying she wasn't sure they were going to make it. And thanks! Been waiting to use that orange pot, I think it looks great with the happy little Sans in it :)

Yes, this forum has been hugely helpful! Happy to blab on about my experience. Once everything is green and growing strong, the two bermudas aren't easily distinguishable. However one greens up faster than the other, so in early spring there's a pretty clear line. This was March 31, 2016:With the pattern of green shoots I'm seeing now, it's probably going to look similar in a couple of weeks. Oddly enough though, they seem to go dormant at closer to the same rate. I've thought a lot about the question of what single thing made the biggest impact. I've got neighbors asking what I do, and when I try to explain the details of soil analyses and pre-em and boron, their eyes glaze. So ultimately the answer I've settled on, and that I think is most correct, is cutting frequency. If I could cut everyday, that'd be best, but over the summer I manage about every 4 days. My neighbor on the right takes great care of her lawn too, but mine I think is slightly stronger and denser because she cuts at most 1x per week. I also have a patch out back that is the same Bermuda sod but its in an odd area so I often go weeks without cutting it. The grass there looks like a completely different plant. It's thin and lanky with super thick blades and lots of brown stem, whereas the maintained area it butts up against is dense, short, with narrow blades and not nearly as much brown stem below. Really cool to see the difference cutting makes. The next most important thing (a distant second I think) was the milorganite, mainly because the iron content gave my grass a unique deeper blueish green compared with my biggest competition in the neighborhood, which happens to be my neighbor on the right. If I were rich, I'd be right there with you reeljake, and do the leveling again this year. Just enough to get those ruts out. But it's just a cost thing. Now that my grass is no longer a disgrace, I've got some other landscaping that I should probably prioritize. Another nice lawn I track has clearly been leveled many many times. It looks great, except for it sitting about 5 inches above the sidewalk. Fortunately for the homeowner, it a pretty steep hill, so no matter what, I don't suppose drainage would be an issue. Not the case for me. Absolutely right that the leveling company left too soon. They started while I was on lunch break, and they were diligently working while I watched, but I had to get back to work and left them to their own for the last part. When I returned they were gone and I kinda felt like since they knew I wasn't watching, they could cut out before really finishing and maybe get started on another job. Ah well. Next time I'll make sure I can stay until the end. Beach sand, ha! You just might be right. Come to think of it, they advertised a special blend of sand+topsoil, but that's clearly not what I got. Whatever it was, it was coarser than what everyone else in the area is using. My neighbors on the left had a company come in with a ridiculous amount of what looked like mortar sand. They covered about 5k sqft of lawn with 2"-3" of sand. Amazingly, the Bermuda eventually came back from that smothering. Theirs seems to still be fairly level and with less rutting than mine. They cut far less often, and they have lots more foot traffic with their kids playing on it, so it's not easy to directly compare I guess. But I am really interested to figure out the rutting. From what you're saying, dchall, it's not necessarily my mowing that's causing it. it's just a pattern that the sand is settling in that encouraged by the shape of my grains. Finally, the aeration was supposedly for what reeljake explained: reduce stratification. And nope, they didn't sweep up the plugs. If you look carefully in the first pic I posted, you an see the plugs being dragged along. Most of them broke up pretty fully, as I don't remember seeing any once they were done.

Checking in. The plants are fabulous. No sign of anymore pests. The one's in the pot are getting so big I had to divide them yesterday, 3 to a pot. They're even bushing out at the bottom! No sun in days, but they don't mind. I just finished ordering insectiside soap that also kills fungus and powdery mildew. Good to go I think. Here's a sad story. I thought of you immediately. lol We're in the country and have a good size of our acre fenced in with dog fencing panels because of our two large dogs. Sometimes a small critter can get in where two panels meet at the bottom, but not often. Yesterday afternoon I looked out the kitchen window and saw a pretty little possom. Thankfully my dogs were inside or it would have been their dinner. When I went outside it immediately played dead and I didn't want to get close to it, so waited for it to go back the way it came in. While watching it from inside, it got up and limped pretty bad. Found some leaves near the fence and laid in it. Later I noticed it got up and was limping along desperately trying to find it's way out. DS was over and he took a look at it while it played dead again and said it had two puncture wounds on it's side, pretty close together. Never heard our dogs barking which they generally do, so I don't know what happened to it. I opened a gate close to the little one and instead of going out he crawed further into the leaves and passed away. It was right before dark so I left him there. This morning he was in the middle of the backyard. LOL Dogs didn't eat him, they just got him out which made it easy for me to lift him with the shovel and lay him under a tree outside the gate. May he rest in peace. Amen.