I mailed mine out yesterday. I finally got the ones I ordered and hurried home on my lunch break to get them mailed. I have to confess...there are two bookmarks in each card...except one. Even though I thought I had checked each envelope twice somehow I ended up with one leftover bookmark. So my apologies to whomever gets the card with only one bookmark in it!

Amy, It was great but we missed you and wished you had been there with us. Jen, I would hope so! If you didn't take home enough plants to keep your busy, then cleary that means you must take home a lot more next year. Mia, They both do vine and do best on a trellis. However, you could let them sprawl if you want. With the Armenian cukes, I grow them both ways....letting each plant climb or spray as it prefers, and get a great harvest either way. With the summer squash plants that are C. moschata, they vine wildly and will do so whether on the ground or climbing something. I find them easier to control on a trellis. In lieu of a trellis, how about an extra large bamboo teepee for each plant? I can just picture a certain little Sprout playing inside each teepee this summer. Dawn

Thanks everyone for the kind words. It was a fun endeavor although next year I think I'll start editing a day or two sooner. It took longer than I thought. I love lists. Reading them and composing them. And they ARE composed, the order is not random. Creating them is a no different task then creating say, a short story or a poem. A list has to be short enough so not to bore but long enough to have weight. Seriousness enough for importance but funny enough for laughs. Ordered enough for sub themes, but random enough to keep interest. Light enough to poke fun but heavy enough to teach. Now that I think about it, there's the makings of a list right there!....hmm... Ok, all seriousness aside.....already gathering for next year. And thanks to everyone for all the great material!!

Yes, this forum has been hugely helpful! Happy to blab on about my experience. Once everything is green and growing strong, the two bermudas aren't easily distinguishable. However one greens up faster than the other, so in early spring there's a pretty clear line. This was March 31, 2016:With the pattern of green shoots I'm seeing now, it's probably going to look similar in a couple of weeks. Oddly enough though, they seem to go dormant at closer to the same rate. I've thought a lot about the question of what single thing made the biggest impact. I've got neighbors asking what I do, and when I try to explain the details of soil analyses and pre-em and boron, their eyes glaze. So ultimately the answer I've settled on, and that I think is most correct, is cutting frequency. If I could cut everyday, that'd be best, but over the summer I manage about every 4 days. My neighbor on the right takes great care of her lawn too, but mine I think is slightly stronger and denser because she cuts at most 1x per week. I also have a patch out back that is the same Bermuda sod but its in an odd area so I often go weeks without cutting it. The grass there looks like a completely different plant. It's thin and lanky with super thick blades and lots of brown stem, whereas the maintained area it butts up against is dense, short, with narrow blades and not nearly as much brown stem below. Really cool to see the difference cutting makes. The next most important thing (a distant second I think) was the milorganite, mainly because the iron content gave my grass a unique deeper blueish green compared with my biggest competition in the neighborhood, which happens to be my neighbor on the right. If I were rich, I'd be right there with you reeljake, and do the leveling again this year. Just enough to get those ruts out. But it's just a cost thing. Now that my grass is no longer a disgrace, I've got some other landscaping that I should probably prioritize. Another nice lawn I track has clearly been leveled many many times. It looks great, except for it sitting about 5 inches above the sidewalk. Fortunately for the homeowner, it a pretty steep hill, so no matter what, I don't suppose drainage would be an issue. Not the case for me. Absolutely right that the leveling company left too soon. They started while I was on lunch break, and they were diligently working while I watched, but I had to get back to work and left them to their own for the last part. When I returned they were gone and I kinda felt like since they knew I wasn't watching, they could cut out before really finishing and maybe get started on another job. Ah well. Next time I'll make sure I can stay until the end. Beach sand, ha! You just might be right. Come to think of it, they advertised a special blend of sand+topsoil, but that's clearly not what I got. Whatever it was, it was coarser than what everyone else in the area is using. My neighbors on the left had a company come in with a ridiculous amount of what looked like mortar sand. They covered about 5k sqft of lawn with 2"-3" of sand. Amazingly, the Bermuda eventually came back from that smothering. Theirs seems to still be fairly level and with less rutting than mine. They cut far less often, and they have lots more foot traffic with their kids playing on it, so it's not easy to directly compare I guess. But I am really interested to figure out the rutting. From what you're saying, dchall, it's not necessarily my mowing that's causing it. it's just a pattern that the sand is settling in that encouraged by the shape of my grains. Finally, the aeration was supposedly for what reeljake explained: reduce stratification. And nope, they didn't sweep up the plugs. If you look carefully in the first pic I posted, you an see the plugs being dragged along. Most of them broke up pretty fully, as I don't remember seeing any once they were done.