Hi Faye, I would be glad to send you some seeds to get your garden blooming again. And I see you like vines , and I just happen to have quite a few different vine seeds that I could send . Let me know. Joyce

I always recommend using alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow) at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. I've been organic since 2002 and see no benefit to changing. Here's a demonstration of how well alfalfa pellets work. The picture was submitted here to GW back a few years ago by mrmumbles. He was testing alfalfa, I think, because he didn't think it would do anything. Clearly the fertilized part is more dense, deeper green, and growing better. If you cannot find alfalfa pellets, any ground up nut, bean, or seed will work. For example soybean meal, corn meal, corn gluten meal, cottonseed meal, etc. Use whatever is inexpensive and comes in 50-pound bags at your local feed store. Do not use deer corn or other whole grain products. Those are viable seeds and will give you a weedy mess until you mow them down. As long as the product is ground or at lease cracked, it will work fine. With organic fertilizers you can use as much or as little as you want. Unlike chemical fertilizers, it does not need to be watered in and you can use it all summer without burning the lawn. A practical limit to the application is about 60 to 70 pounds per 1,000 square feet. At that point you would be smothering the lawn. There is another limit to use in that using too much at once can cause an aroma of decomposing protein (sour milk). If you stick to 10-25 pounds per 1,000, that aroma goes away quickly. Use more and it seems to linker forever. That aroma is an ammonia smell, and you want all that smell to stay in your yard, so just stick to the low rates.

If you are lucky the pods may dry a bit and the seeds may be viable. I have had seed pods get knocked off before and let them dry in a warm dry place until the pod split open. It just depends on how mature that pod was before being removed. Karen

For your location in SoCal I would stay away from rye and fescue, including the popular Marathon dwarf fescues. Those work if you're down in the lower coastal fog zones, but not at all where you are. It gets too hot in the summer there, and you have to water it every day to keep it alive. Instead if you have full sun and no large trees casting shadows on the yard, I would recommend either hybrid TIF 419 bermuda (sod only) or UC Verde Buffalograss (plugs only). Both of these are fine bladed and extremely drought tolerant. You can rest easy if you end up under watering restrictions. The turf may look parched but it will come back at the first rain. The bermuda requires more mowing and fertilizer to look great. The UC Verde pretty much lives on with minimal mowing and fertilizer. But those are only for full sun yards. If you have buildings, fences, shrubs, or trees making shadows, both the bermuda and the buffalo will thin way out in those shady spots. Another relatively drought and heat tolerant turf is St Augustine. It is a coarse bladed turf compared to the others and comes as plugs or sod. When mowed at the mower's highest setting and watered deeply once every 2 weeks (in your area this time of year), it should be great for you even in fairly deep shade.