Zone 7 is pretty vague. How about a town and state? All of the major cool season grasses can be cut lower than 3 inches, including tall fescue. When you cut shorter, you are putting more stress on the grass, and it will likely require more watering and more frequent mowing since you should only remove 1/3 of the total blade length. Both KBG and perennial rye can be cut to fairway heights but this requires the right cultivars, and the correct cultural practices for this extreme height. For tall fescue the lowest I would go would be 2 inches, and this would require gradually lowering your cut height, not all at once.

I just checked the Brooklyn Botannical Garden site... Once the new growth of sedum is up, to prevent later flopping give them a cutback once or twice in May or June. New foliage will regenerate in a few weeks. Shouldn't be much, if any, delay in blooming - VA has a long growing season. You can also propagate the sedums from your cuttings, too. With a 6" cutting off the top of a sedum, strip off the lower leaves, and cut the remaining leaves in half and plop in the ground. Must be even easier than that to propagate since I've gotten a couple of volunteers from just unnoticed broken leaves sitting on the soil.

The concept of mowing shorter only applies when seeding. Here's something to think about. If everyone mows short to reseed every fall, then people get in the habit of mowing short in the fall. Some people will forget that the reason they are mowing short is to reseed and will mow short even after they reseeded. Interestingly, the parents will pass these habits on to their children.

Kim, I understand about always feeling behind and resolving to do better the next year.....but we still have to work with whatever weather we get and that sure can get in the way of doing things at the schedule we humans would prefer. It is just too early to start getting ahead of yourself with seed-starting in early January (unless you have tons of space indoors or a heated greenhouse to play in). I try really hard every year to not start planting things too early until February rolls around. Once the calendar says February, I lose all self-control. Dorothy, Our overnight low this morning was 15 but the greenhouse only went down to 28. I have tons and tons of molasses feed tubs, 5-gallon jugs and cat litter buckets/jugs filled with water lining all the walls and beneath the tables. While that water won't hold tons of heat, it usually keeps the greenhouse above freezing until we hit about 18 degrees outdoors, so everything I have in there overwinters fine without heat. Sometimes if we are expected to go down below about 18 or 20, I throw row cover fabric over the plants but I didn't last night. It already is 64 degrees in there right now, so I need to open the doors and vents soon so that the lettuce doesn't get too hot and start bolting. We've had the greenhouse hit 115 on a sunny winter day that has bright sunlight and no wind to speak of. Obviously I don't actually want it to hit 115 degrees in there, but if I need to get the feeling of being in a sauna, I only have to go step into the greenhouse on a sunny, winter day and bask in that steamy heat for a minute before I start opening doors and vents. Robert, I can tell you get stir-crazy if you aren't busy all the time. "Busy1" certainly fits you to a T. Your activity level reminds me of my friend, Fred, who lives up the road from us just a little bit and who is still ranching and gardening in his early 90s. When he stops by to chat and tells me what he's been doing on any given day, just listening to him wears me out. He squeezes in about 10 times as much work into a day as I do, and I'm not lazy. I just work at a more moderate speed, and you guys must work at a super-high-speed to squeeze all your activities into your days. I have noticed that the ranchers and farmers here who never slow down and who are always busy working are the ones who outlive the retired ones that just spend their last few years sitting on the porch. So, I think staying busy and active keeps you young, and you don't have to grow up any time soon if you don't want to. Being young at heart is a gift to be enjoyed. If you're looking for someone to convince you to slow down and "act your age", it will not be me. I do spread myself too thin at times too, but more often it is from February through October. I try to relax more once the weather gets cold because I am not real fond of being cold. Winter time is when I stay indoors more and work on indoor projects. I used to spend every single day of winter clearing the underbrush in our 10 acres of woods, but keeping the brush clear just made it easy for poachers to sneak onto our property and hunt without permission. Now that I let all the greenbrier and other pesky brush take over the edges of the woodland again, we don't have much trouble with poachers any more. Good luck in the gopher wars. Our cats keep them at bay here, but they cannot control the pine voles that come out of the woods, often at night and usually underground. We'll never be rid of them because we're surrounded by woodland, so I just use 1/4" hardware cloth to line the raised beds and grow root crops there. The voles do get some plants every year that aren't grown in raised beds, but that's just a fact of life. We went to a wildfire east of Thackerville last spring in an area with very deep, sandy soil. There were so many gopher holes (and those feral pig holes that those big rascals dig) that it was hard to walk through the field without twisting an ankle. It made me thankful that so little of our soil was sandy. They had the remains of the previous year's melon vines and rotted melons (only dried-up skin remained) still in the fields. I am not sure why they didn't harvest the melons---maybe they sunburned and weren't worth harvesting, or maybe the gophers and other critters got to them. I just looked at that sand and shook my head, trying to imagine all the issues that come along with sugar sand, particularly nematodes. It almost made me grateful that we have red clay. Almost. Dawn