Easy to answer, not so easy to accomplish. ORGANIC MATERIAL (OM). Mulch all your leaves into your grass. Topdress your lawn with compost. Make your own compost. Recylcle all your paper, kitchen scraps, Old k-mart stock certificates. Use organic fertilizers. Feed your soil microbes. Condition your lawn for summer's drought. Stop (or at least minimize )using chemicals on your lawn. Since you are re-seeding every year, use top quality elite cultivars of seed. With a good organic rich soil, you will not have to dethatch, aerate or re-seed a quality KBG lawn EVER. A good soil retains water thus reducing the need for irrigation. Check out the organic lawn forum and the soil and compost forum. If you can change your mindset, you can have a beautiful lawn by September and next spring will blow you away. Good luck with your lawn, Razzy from Nebraska.

Donnann, your Bee Balm garden sounds like heaven! and I am so sorry that naughty Woodchuck literally cleaned up his plate with your garden...I am sending much warm wishes for your Bee balm garden's speedy recovery...Yes, definitely get wire fencing for it. I would have loved to have seen your Bee Balm Garden.I am keeping my fingers crossed that Mr. Woodchuck will chomp on only the wild weeds instead, like crabgrass or nutsedge or those invasive tree shrubs! I recently saw Kristenflower's absolutely gorgeous rose/lavender heaven too at the gallery and was so impressed! Yours and hers are ideal bee gardens just like Celestialrose. I need to grow much more bee balm because I found out that my dwarf bee balm is not as "invasive" as I had hoped, LOL, no thanks to my crappy soil. I actually planted my bee balm away from my roses in a bare 3 by 3 area. My bee-attracting plants are too young, too few to really attract many bees so next time I have to amp the collection and not! deadhead my beebalm, hoping the seeds will scatter My dad on the other hand has 3 crabapple trees, a persimmon tree, a dwarf apple tree, his yard is completely overrun with wild honeysuckle bushes, lilacs, a forest of hollyhocks and sweet peas(which the bumblebees used to love before they died, one flowering redbud tree, winterberry, azaleas, gardenias, jasmine, 3 crazy rosebushes that are like 8' tall because he never prunes them, 1 rootstock Dr. Huey, all these bee and bird attracting plants which I am so jealous about...But! he does not have bee balm... I think he can certainly add this to his collection...Donna, LOL! I think you will be "enabling" him; the neighbors already think he's got enough of a jungle...Also genes run in the family, hahahaha! I tried to keep as tidy of a garden as I could, but my garden still looks like a jungle because I planted like 50! overly tall gladiolus and now I want to grab some of my Dads overly tall hollyhocks as well! Anyway, I cant wait to see your bee balm garden recover and flourish once again. Hugs! Greenhaven alas I have just a handful of those native beesbut am grateful that at least I have those few. Your post reminded me, do you remember that "I am so excited thread" I wrote? The wonderful cute Mr. Bumblebee that used to visit my garden in May did not survive it seemsIn Mid-June it disappeared after my next door neighbor hired a professional pesticide company to spray the foundations of their home. Perhaps it too was Sevin? It was not until an entire month and a half passed that my Dads bees disappeared... (he and I live in completely separate neighborhoods and bees only have that 3 mi. radius anyways) So as you can see I feel why I feel so guilty. Perhaps if I had mentioned this to my Dad, who knows something could have been prevented? Again, you may be right in that the wild bees are hardier in comparison. They have shorter life spans and dont have communal hives, and that is why they have survived You see if you do the research and look up native bees youll discover thisThey dont have the hives and therefore, they dont have the communal death that the honeybees experience when they are exposed to Sevin. Because wild bees have so many tiny individual nests, each is independent of each other ... Not so with honeybees. Once their hive is contaminated, their entire hive is destroyed, thousands are gone. But to be honest I will always love the honeybee and bumblebees more... There's just something so special about their fuzziness that I love!

Tricia, I am so terribly sorry to hear this. What a tragedy and yes, small towns feel a loss like this much more than larger impersonal places. I hope cell phone use was not involved. It is so crazy. Just last night on the way home I had to swerve onto the shoulder of the road to avoid a woman who was looking down at her cell phone (probably texting) and crossed the center line. Thank God we were not going any faster. I was in Mystic just a couple years ago and it is small and so charming. I am so sorry this happened. Please be careful out there everyone.

Dnilsen, I'm so sorry about the loss of your home. I can empathize; ours burned early in 2010, and we are (just) now about to move into our new house. The emotional impact of the fire has been enormous, and tears still come. But we're so thankful to be moving into a new home and getting ready for new memories, happy holidays, and yes, a more energy efficient home (with smoke detectors galore.) We live in Tennessee. In our experience, the cost of materials was not cheap and has increased throughout the process, partly, we were told, due to the devastating tornadoes in Alabama and Missouri this year. And labor costs cannot be called cheap in our area; but maybe there IS a little more willingness to negotiate price. However, interest rates ARE very good! People will tell you to expect your house to cost more than you had planned; I think that's true. SOMETHING will likely come up that you had not expected, and it could be expensive. The forums on this website have been THE BEST sources of information that I've found during our build. Best wishes to your family!