The variance of mutations that get these cultivars started really blow my mind. I germinated probably a hundred and fifty metasequoias this summer, and some are now two feet tall while others are only inches. Some weep, some stand erect and turgid. So much variance, it's easy for me to understand how these cultivars work. I'm obsessed with this tree, that's why I germinated so many of them if anybody's interested. I also just got a book about metasequoia by Ben Lepage. It's pretty indepth, and there's a lengthy article about cultivar selection and propagation and how the current cultivars came into being. Pretty interesting. The book cost about a hundred bucks, so christ, it better be pretty interesting. -ss

Greetings jampack, Thank you for your generous comments. I absolutely, completely agree with you about "reinventing" ourselves. I call it creating a new life using the strengths from the "beloved life" or just simply "the past." We can view the beloved life but we cannot participate in it anymore, so take the strength of the beauty of the memories and the great love shared and heal the pain of grief and move into creating a new life. What really encouraged me in always moving forward in my healing from the pain of grief was to take care with my thoughts and my self-talk. What I think, I create. My thoughts become things. If I think something will be horrible........guess what, it WILL definitely be horrible!! Or, "I will never get through this, I am destined to suffer from now until I die." But, if my thoughts go like this: "This will be a difficult situation for me and I will experience deep pain (or agony, discomfort, embarrassment, fear, etc) but I know with great faith, I will get through this and be stronger for the journey." The situations and events that this can be applied to are endless. But it must be used fervently. It doesn't have to even be believed at first. But practice, practice, practice. Write the phrase down and carry it with you. Having been a consummate, professional horse trainer for over 30 yrs, I used those very skills to train myself to heal. In training horses, compassion, kindness and positivity are the greatest tools for success; and, the successes are measured in tiny increments....tiny steps. When one is in the throes of the most horribly, painful feelings of their entire life, DON'T STOPKEEP MOVING!!! I have heard countless times when I share my story at grief seminars, "When my spouse (child, parent, sibling) died, I died with them and my life has ended." Now, this is 100% true, but only to the extent that the life with the deceased has ended. Then, too, a large percentage of those folks refuse to/don't know how to create a new life. It is common for these folks and fellow grievers to feel that by torturing themselves with as much pain as they can inflict on themselves, they are honoring their beloved departed one. But, just sit back for a moment and do a "what if" scenario. What if you, yourself, died, was killed, committed suicide, or whatever, would you want your family and loved ones to stay in a painful, morose, joyless, depressed agony for the rest of their time on this earth; day after day, year after year???? I absolutely wouldn't. I would pray that they transplant themselves into a wonderful new life to experience once again joy, happiness and love. I have heard the cry, "Will I always feel this way?" or "Will the pain EVER go away?" My answer is a resounding, jubilant YES, YES, YES!!! The pain will recede when you choose to let go of it; but, only if you choose to heal the pain of grief. You must decide for yourself, "Am I clinging to the pain because if I let it go I will lose the love for my beloved or they will forget about me or I will forget about them?????" I can assure you with all of my heart that if you stop clinging and release the grip on what can never be, you will experience the closeness of what can be. (I feel such a warm, loving, close relationship with my Michael, now.) Do you always want to feel "this way?" It is your choice!! Everyone heals at their own pace. Consider it to be like planting a seed. It seems like forever before the little seedling pops through the soil and starts growing towards the energy of the sun, to blossom and grow to grandeur. But, we must keep watering it even if we don't see it yet. So goes our healing. The mind is critical and sharp, with a tendency to focus on what's wrong, rather than appreciating what's right. When you have gone SO far that you can't manage ONE MORE STEP!---------------------Remember, you have gone just half the distance you are capable of. Turquoise

Whaa? Something else we might want to do is start new threads more often. It might be a little bothersome to have multiple ones to open but scrolling, scrolling, scrolling ... is also bothersome. Perhaps a thread title more specific to the drift the conversation has taken will be more relevant. You know, however, if many people are attracted to RMG, we are faced with answering the same questions, again and again. I read a quote by an ancient Zen master the other day. It was simply, something similar to, "I don't understand Zen." Ha! I don't understand gardening ... no truer words could be spoken. Steve

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.