Van Engelen is a wholesale division of John Scheepers. Same warehouse and varieties, same quality, same customer service. All three deserve an A+ in my opinion, though some people received mislabeled lilies from them couple of years ago. B&B has a nice inventory as well, but lately I'm not happy neither with their pricing nor the quality. Also, they ship as they wish to, not as I requested. In another words, I think that VE/JS provides better value for money. re: Tulipa turkestanica. In order for them to naturalize you have to provide only one condition: their planting area should NOT be watered in a summer. Bone dry is OK, preferably no mulch. They could be overplanted by drough tolerant groundcover sedums.

Fall is the ideal time to re-seed/overseed, but in my opinion they should have overseeded in early spring. The #1 way to prevent weeds is to have thick, healthy turf grass, mowed at 3.5-4 inches. A healthy lawn will block the crabgrass from getting any sun and ultimately smother it. Granted, you still would have had plenty of weeds this summer, it's not like your first overseed in the spring would have magically created a lush lawn, but it would have given you a foundation, so that this fall you could really overseed and by next spring have a thick, healthy lawn. It seems like a waste to put grub control, fertilizer, and per-emergent on sparse lawn. Really, they were just fertilizing the weeds. Timing is very critical on the pre-emergent, especially so with organic corn meal gluten. You need to put it down when the forsythia starts to bloom or the first 3 consecutive 50+ degree days. If they missed that window, it's effectiveness is compromised. Depends when in April they put it down. Should have been down the first week, the latest. If you have that many weeds it would be best to start over completely. You need to really kill all those weed seeds and the only way to do that is to either use roundup all over the lawn or preferable without using chemicals by using a process called Solarization (see link below). You could get started doing all of this right away and be ready by late august for core aeration, overseeding, and most likley lime application, but I would HIGHLY recommend having a soil test done. UConn may have an extension office, I know Umass does and it is cheap and provides PH and all the other key nutrient levels of your lawn. Good Luck Shawn Here is a link that might be useful: Lawn Solarization

I'd plant them sometime in the next six months. People have kept them in car trunks for a year and still had some rhizomes survive. Bearded iris rhizomes are not quite like any other plant in what they like and what they dislike. If you try to treat them like a normal perennial, you will probably kill them with kindness. They are adapted to a summer dry climate. That is when they are dormant, and when they want very little water. That is going to be one of the worst problems you will have with growing them - keeping them dry enough during the summer.

gold243: Thanks! That promotional code worked and you just saved me $60 off my order, plus I ended up signing up for their credit card and saved another 10% off my entire order. Not sure if you saw some threads I'd posted a few weeks back about bedding for my DD with eczema, but I finally decided to order her bedding from this store. I ordered her a few different items for her bed, plus a travel matelasse in natural organic cotton.