That being said, i wanted to take this opportunity to elaborate a bit more on "common bermudas". Common to me is just a term that indicates a bermuda that can be established by seed. There are however, improved common varieties that will tolerate mowing down to 1/2". some include Princes, Yukon, riviera, sahara, mohawk and there are others. Below i wanted to show you 4 different types of bermudas, from thinest stem to thickest stem. 1. Tiff 419 (Hybrid bermuda) 2. Yukon (improved common) 3. what might be Celebration 4. "Common bermuda" aka arizona common. Notice the thickness of each. The reason I'm showing you this is to help those out there understand why you typically mow common bermuda at taller heights. I never realized there was a big difference between bermudas until I had my own bermuda lawn. That previous picture i posted is made up of bermuda 3 and 4. I mow it at 1" with a reel mower 2-3 times a week. I have mowed it with a rotary mower as well and it still looks nice but not as clean cut as my reel. With the rotary mower it does tend to suck up the grass giving it a choppy look when i mow. Have in mind the more sun your yard gets, the denser it will be, that being said, it can scalp easier with a rotary when it is denser. SO.. In your case, i would mow at 1.25" or even 1.5" until you decide to go for a reel mower. Remember, if you do have a improved variety, you can probably get away with the lowest setting on your rotary mower once you have given it a scalp (below desired height) at the beginning of the season. I mostly speak from experience.....

I am new with this as well. I love Kabocha squash and I had saved some seeds from one I bought at the health food store a few years ago. I was late in planting, probably late July and it took them about a month to really get going. The male flowers came first followed by the females about 3 weeks later. It is now August 2 and we just hand pollinated our first female flower this morning. I am so excited! We don't have many pollinators in this area and I had read before that if you want to ensure you get fruit you should probably hand pollinate, so, that is what we did. I planted only two squash this year. We have about 10 more female flowers that are not mature enough to open yet. I check them every day because the flowers are only open for a very short time, so, the window of opportunity is very small. I can't wait to watch the babies grow. I am hoping I can get about 10 squash off of the two plants. I have read you are lucky if you get one per vine, but, with hand pollinating I am hoping for at least two. I now have 5 vines growing. They are very aggressive and seem to take over whatever is in their path. I have a second year carrot growing for the seeds and the squash seems to be taking it down, literally. I also have spearmint growing to the side and so far I have been able to detour the squash by simply picking up the vine and moving it away from the spearmint. If you move them as they are first growing outward they seem easily deterred. I didn't have to move them much, maybe only 5 inches. I love these plants and have gotten a lot of joy out of watching. I water them every night when the sun goes down. I planted them in a manure enriched soil I bought at Walmart. I have not used any other fertilizer on them and they are growing great. However, I did read that the key to growing these squash is Patience, patience, patience. They are not something that grows overnight. Also, don't be too anxious to harvest them. They are suppose to stay on the vine until the vine dries up and falls away from the fruit. In the end they stem looks like that of a pumpkin. I hope you are enjoying your plants as much as I am mine. I am planning to plant a lot more next year and in a place in the yard where they have lots of room to branch out without worrying about them taking over any other plants. Good luck to you. :)

It takes training in the aesthetics of design, and basic space planning, which is offered from many design schools, yes, but it also takes a great deal of knowledge of construction, local building codes, the intimate knowledge of 5 different cabinet lines's 300 pages of specs and their individual quirks and prices. It takes the ability to learn gracefully from your mistakes, and to be willing to earn almost nothing while you are doing so--and for a good long time after you pass the beginning stage. It takes the abilty to financially be able to absorb those errors that you make, and still be able to be creative enough to show up to work making that Target outfit look like Donna Karan and that peanut butter sandwich taste like a gourmet meal, while you worry if you will have enough gas to put in the car to make it to work for the rest of the week. It takes the ability to absorb the daily slaps in the face that actual creativity in your design will get you when you realize that the client really just wants something that looks like everyone else's kitchen, but maybe with just a different colored granite. It takes the ability to be yelled at by a client, cabinet representative, and installer about different aspects of a project that each wants to blame the other for, and be able to remain calm and find a workable solution for all. It takes the ability to babysit some of the biggest and whiniest "grown" children on the planet who think that just because they want something done, there has to be a way to do it---and at the cheapest possible budget. So, yes, being a KD takes training in art or design, but it also takes abilities as a financial counselor, contractor, engineer, psychologist, marriage counselor, mind reader, and magician, to be able to put it all together and actually be successful long term without going bankrupt first. :~)

Greendesigns, you had me with - "Of course, then there are the issues you find out during demolition and the mistakes that you the homeowner and your trades will make. The only surety that you can have for a remodel is that it will cost more and take longer than you think it will." ...but you lost me at the $500 over budget part. That would be truly funny if it were not painfully way too low. Try thousands upon thousands over budget. Of course, our reno involved more than a kitchen, but the overages were for many reasons. One of which was our gc trying to a la carte us to death. We had our master bedroom extended and yet he felt the need to charge extra, after contract, to re-set up the cable in the same bedroom. I can go one with many more examples, but that one illustrates well. Another reason is just about everyone who touched our job did something major wrong. The cabs were delivered shy 13 cabinets (big delay). Someone threw out the below the counter parts to our faucet. The architect drew our plans without going all the way into the stand up attic and assumed a whole section of the house had beams running in one direction when they went another way. The mistake was not figured out until our roof was ripped off, in Dec., no less. That lost us another month (and a lot of money). The sink leaked, the dw leaked, the icemaker leaked, the electricians screwed up the bathroom vent fan. They messed up the thermostat and heating (took weeks to sort out and still is not right). They installed the eyebrow window wrong and it took weeks of arguing and troubleshooting to try to rectify what was done. The cab installers made the island the wrong height and then damaged a cover panel. The counter guy mismeasured the island counters and had to remake them (6 month delay!). The gc's guys installed the vent for the kitchen in the wrong place, then at the wrong height, twice, and now it only functions as a light and I can bang my head on it if I am not careful. The house had rot in the sills which was discovered when the back of it was torn off. Our doors were delivered in the wrong sizes and one was warped. The flooring company sold me the wrong products so they ended up failing after installation and will be redone soon. Our propane line was installed to the wrong location so we got rejected on our c.o.s and can't hook up our stove yet (10 months and counting). To put it mildly, nothing went well the first try. If all had been done properly and professionally, it could have been done much sooner and with less stress and closer to budget. It seems like the good gcs are less prevalent based on speaking to others who renovate locally and gw these days.... In theory, a gc should make a project go smoother and faster.