My problem with the garden is every flower seems white. Need some color. The foliage looks nice. Flowers though to me are secondary to texture and foliage color, which in this garden is pretty good! I myself would not move the grass or sedge whatever it is. It makes the texture change. My garden is wild with overgrowth. It seems with perennials I'm always thinning them. Another suggestion is flower type, I don't see anything with spikes. You want different flower forms. Maybe a daisy form flower too. Irises etc. If you like the white look fine, but I myself would add silvers or silver foliage, or pastels would look great! Another consideration is early, mid, and late flowering plants. So it looks good all season. I myself am still experimenting, I doubt I will ever actually ever finish but keep changes things. Plus the fun of growing new plants. I have a flair for the unusual. My porch is full of tropical's, trees and plants like Pony Tail palm, Yucca tree, night blooming jasmine, etc. I have bamboo and cacti in the ground too. Some forms are winter hardy. It doesn't look typical! It looks eccentric, but I'm very much so! Mostly though I grow edibles and I'm into edible landscapes. I want to grow as many ornamental edibles as possible besides your normal garden. So edible dogwoods, June berries like Autumn Brilliance. Red leafed peach trees Weeping plum trees. A currant cordon on the fence, I like edible vines like Eastern Magnolia. Edible wild flowers are in the garden too. Strawberry and raspberry ground covers are next to be put in. Yes some raspberries are ground covers. I also grow regular raspberries too, I have 15 plants. I get 25-50 berries daily for 4 months. I have Pluots, and a Spice Zee Nectaplum. Indian Free peach that Thomas Jefferson grew. It is pretty much a jungle here! Many plants are small give me a few years, and I will show photos. It's still under construction. This post was edited by Drew51 on Thu, Oct 10, 13 at 10:09

I sewed some puckers in the back of a quilt I did last year. I'm generally a perfectionist, but I'm also very impatient & HATE "the ripper". As long as the pleat wasn't on the front or huge, I let it go. It was my first largish size quilt I quilted all by machine with a free motion foot (hexagons, triangles). I consider it my learning quilt since I learned a few things NOT to do, but it's still beautiful on both sides...the back is batik & disguises the puckers. I'm impatient & sewed too quick at times & therefore pushed (maybe shoved?) the quilt thru the machine. I also wasn't patient enough to flatten & adjust the quilt layers each & everytime I had to turn it, so with each & every turn, there's pucker potential. This will also happen if you don't pin or baste good enough. Again...I didn't baste as good as I should have. Ran out of pins. I also like the applique idea. But for me, unless it's a really large pleat or hole, that just adds more time to the project when I could be just done with this one & starting another one. ;) My scrapbooking motto is: "If it doesn't look right...glitter it". Glitter will fix just about any flaw or add some spice to a scrapbook page. I haven't quite figured out how to tactfully add glitter to my quilts. :)

I'm so sorry. I was in your shoes this time last year. I knew our almost 13 year old German Shorthair Pointer was at the end of his life, and I was thinking I'd wait until after Christmas, but I realized that I needed to do it the right thing for him even though it was hard for me. We put him down on Dec. 17. :( I probably waited a bit too long, and I didn't realize how much stress I'd been under thinking about whether or not it was the right time until he was gone. There was almost a sense of relief. Missing him wasn't as difficult as wondering and worrying about whether or not I was doing the right thing. We all still miss him terribly, though. When the time comes, I highly recommend getting a vet to come to your house. It was so peaceful and less stressful than taking him to the office.

The San Diego location isn't specific enough. If you live in La Jolla you can grow fescue all day long. If you live east of Grossmont Center, you can't. Tell me more specifically where you live and I can suggest something more specific for the lawn. With your shade it's either going to be the Marathon (with proper care) or St Augustine. Other grasses won't survive the shade. The sod was probably good sod to begin with. The problem is selecting Marathon (dwarf fescue) sod instead of either bermuda or St Augustine. Fescue grasses are considered good in cool climates. Putting them in warm climates is a bad idea and a really bad idea in a location faced with water shortages. In San Diego area either bermuda (full sun) or St Augustine (partial to heavy shade but also full sun) should be the predominant lawn types. Unless you are in the morning fog zone next to the beach, trying to grow fescue or Kentucky bluegrass would require torrential amounts of irrigation. Many years ago there was a visitor here from National City. He had basic soil issues, but growing fescue was relatively easy for him because of the morning fog and afternoon coastal breeze. The previous owners should have been watering new sod 3x per day (breakfast, lunch and dinner) for about 5 minutes each time until the sod roots knit into the ground. By the time you moved in watering should have backed off on the frequency until you were watering 1/2 inch twice a week. The only way you can know how much 1/2 inch is is to measure it with the cat food or tuna cans. Here is the whole scoop on lawn watering for mature turf. Watering: Deep and infrequent is the mantra for watering. This is for all turf grass all over the place. Deep means 1 inch all at one time. Put some cat food or tuna cans around the yard, and time how long it takes your sprinkler(s) to fill all the cans. Memorize that time. That will be the time you water from now on. My hose, sprinkler and water pressure takes 8 full hours to fill the cans. Your time will likely be less. I like gentle watering. As for watering frequency, that depends on the daytime air temperature. With temps in the 90s, deep water once per week. With temps in the 80s, deep water once every 2 weeks. With temps in the 70s, deep water once every 3 weeks. With temps below 70, deep water once a month. Note that you have to keep up with quickly changing temps in the spring and fall. This deep and infrequent schedule works in Phoenix and in Vermont, so it should work for you. The reason for deep and infrequent is to grow deeper, more drought resistant roots and to allow the soil to dry completely at the surface for several days before watering again. If it rains, reset your calendar to account for the rainfall. Having said that, you don't have mature turf, so watering half the rate but twice the frequency would be better until you have developed some deep roots. Taking the above into consideration, if you lived in downtown SD or to the west, summertime watering would be once every week and a half at 1/2-inch. If you lived in El Cajon you'd be watering twice a week at 1/2-inch. My assumption is that i will need to remove the sod, till the ground and lay new seed. New seed is simple, but not like that. Above all, NEVER rototill in preparation for sod. I would suggest that 'never rototill' was universal advice for all gardening, but defending that position is a huge digression. But for lawns it's a bad idea because the fluffy soil will never settle evenly. It will become bumpy almost immediately and get bumpier and bumpier over the next 3 years. You'll hate yourself for tilling. If you are seeding fescue, summertime is the worst time of year. Spring is only slightly better, but the results will be equally poor. Fall is the best time after the summer heat breaks and the evening temps are cooling off. Really need to know where you are in the SD area and what you plan to do on the grass.