Got any shopping centers near you or a bank or something similar that has landscaped beds of low lying shrubs that are watered on a regular basis? If so then go look and see if you can find any moss growing in the shaded portions of those planters. If so then that should tell you if your water is ok for moss. Also note the type of moss you find. Not all mosses are created equal! Thinner leaved mosses may be more sensitive to your water than those with thicker walls in their leaf cells. If your moss is natural then maybe the drought is something the mosses have evolved to be able to rebound from in the course of time??

Since your seeds were labeled as "North American Natives", it seems like they surely must be natives. Hope so! Usually when you see mixed seeds at a box store, they say "wildflowers" rather than "natives". You may get some plants that you don't like but I think you should go ahead and plant them. You'll undoubtedly get some that you DO like. Orange Butterfly Weed (asclepias tuberosa) is hard to beat. It blooms a long time, attracts butterflies and shows up well from a distance. That one may be in the seed mix that you bought as well as purple coneflowers which I never tire of. Rudbeckia hirta and gaillardias are nice too. Your mix may also contain a lot of plants that won't tolerate hot summers very well. I would love to have a wildflower meadow but have gotten the impression that it's one of those things that's not easy to do successfully, and I've just never tried. I did plant a long mixed shrub/perennial border along one side of our property several years ago and haven't done a very good job at keeping the weeds out. I enjoy it immensely though. I love gardening/wildlife etc. If you're doing it only to save time mowing, you definitely may be disappointed. Otherwise, there's no harm in trying. If your wildflower garden doesn't work out the way you want, you can always collect free seeds from your favorites and start over. Just my opinion but - Since you're in an area of new homes and you may be pressured to have a tidy yard, I think it would make the area look more intentional and attractive to put a section of split rail fence or picket fence across the front to separate it from the rest of your yard. That way your snooty neighbors won't think you're just being lazy about mowing. : ) I would also leave several feet of mowed area between your house and the wildflower patch to make it look neater and so you can easily walk from the front of your house to the back without having to spray yourself with Off every time to keep the ticks and chiggers away. Opinion again - I think you would appreciate having a couple mowed paths through the middle to make it easier to get from one side to the other and so you can see what's growing. Ticks don't hang out in mowed grass nearly as much as knee or waist high areas. Planting shrubs might make it more difficult to maintain. Maybe some others will give you opinions on that. I have trouble with invasive vines, undesirable trees, poke, poison ivy, etc. coming up around my shrubs close to the base where it's hard to remove them. What I think you had in mind is a prairie type area that you can just mow down once a year. Right?

Carol, you're a hoot! Like most of you, with the exception of things that are newly planted (we planted two new trees this year to replace two that we lost in a storm over the winter) and my potted vegetable garden which is on the deck and in bright sun for most of the day, we don't water daily or on a routine basis either. The veggies do get watered daily as a rule, but I also try to capture rainwater which I then use to water them - a trick we learned from some friends in GA who lived through the drought involving Lake Lanier. It's easily done by directing water from the gutters into 55 gallon trash barrels. If it's been a week or two with high heat and no rain, we look to see who is wilting (OTHER than ME) and we water if the plants are showing signs of significant stress, but honestly, that doesn't happen very often and we only give a good soaking to those beds that are looking haggard. But when we water, we do soak them thoroughly, and we do it either in the very early AM or late evening. One thing we did a couple of years ago that has made a tremendous difference was to invest in SoilMoist and add it into our beds around every plant. This is a synthetic additive that holds a tremendous amount of water (200 times its weight) and then releases it during times of drought, when the plants need it most. Adding it after the fact is a major chore because you can't just spread it around the garden or rake it into the soil around the plant -- you need to get it down near the roots. That meant either digging down along side the plant or lifting the plants out completely, adding the SoilMoist, and then replanting. It took us an entire growing season to get started with it. Now when we plant, we add a couple of tablespoons or more for something larger like a tree and we add it in the bottom of the hole with the compost and manure. Putting it where it can help larger shrubs and roses can be challenging and very time consuming if they aren't easily lifted. When we were dealing with some of the huge roses and shrubs, we dug down next to them using a heavy duty long handled weeding tool and sometimes a bulb planting tool to make a narrow tunnel next to the plant so that we could be sure to get the SoilMoist deep enough. I've been told that it does have a "life span" but so far, it seems to be doing the job and has shown no signs of losing it's water retaining ability. Other than the trees, which need watering a couple of times a week at least, and some new things we planted, which were watered liberally until they got established, (and the vegetables on the deck), I don't think we've watered more than 6 times this entire season. And once even a new plant becomes established, it often only needs watering when the entire bed does -- the SoilMoist is that effective. Mulching also makes a big difference. We use shredded leaf mold for mulch and that also reduces the amount of watering needed as it provides protection from the sun and slows drying considerably. Best of all, it composts right in the beds and becomes the darkest humus you've ever seen (except for that gorgeous black dirt in Minnesota). We make our own mulch. We get several truckloads of leaves dropped off in the fall by a landscaper friend who only brings leaves from properties that he maintains so we know that they are going to be free of serious pest problems (like nasty blights) and unwanted chemicals. Over the course of the fall, we run them through the Mighty Max and then we let them compost over the winter, covered by tarps. Then we run them through Max again in the spring. This gets put on the beds as a mulch and in the fall, we top them off again and add a bit of manure as well with another couple of inches Having done it both ways in the same garden, I can tell you with certainty that the combination of the SoilMoist and the thick mulch really makes a dramatic difference in terms of watering. Our gardens are pretty extensive and people often ask us where we hide the irrigation heads. (We don't have an irrigation system at all.) We have only a half acre but the entire thing is a series of garden beds. (We do have a token bed of "grass" and yes, it did turn brown during the recent dry spell we had -- it isn't blessed with the benefit of SoilMoist or mulch LOL -- but the rest of the beds were only watered in some cases once, some cases twice, and some cases not at all. Before we started using this regimen, we were watering some part of this garden daily and we were losing plants despite our best efforts. Now, even the weeds look like they're right out of Jurassic Park. Cathy (MA)

John, if you find out what is native in your area that is the best way to go. Those mixes(from Home Depot) are tantalizing but if you read what's in them there's alot of stuff that is just pretty flowers but non-native. One of the awesome things about natives is you don't have to haul in topsoil or fertilize, they grow in decent dirt and should'nt need supplemental watering if planted during spring or fall. If that is a septic field where you want to plant there are native mixes that won't interfere with the septic. In fact my favorite planting is a septic field mix that has baby bluestem,monarda punctata,hoary vervain and a bunch of other forbs that apparently don't have real deep root systems. It's real pretty and growing on crappy sandy, rocky soil. I would kill all that is there now, and keep killing through-out each season's weeds.Then put down your mix. Maybe you can rescue the coneflowers first before you kill. My property is old farmstead also and there were tons of weeds waiting to rock that had to be exterminated. I have vast areas that are solid thistle that will be my focus this spring,it won't be pretty... good luck and be patient, it's hard work but worth it.