Posted by dchall_san_antonio 8 San Antonio (My Page) on Wed, Jun 5, 13 at 20:37 You should put some cat food or tuna cans in the yard to measure the real output of your sprinklers. Time how long they run and see how much you get in the cans. Ideally you will apply 1 inch per week in the hottest heat of summer - AFTER THE SOD IS GROWING WELL. I did this in all my 9 zones for 15 mins & multiplying by 4 to a get a 60 mins equivalent. then recently set my Rain Bird controller with these assumptions & let it do its thing. But I am sceptical as it appears the RB algorithm likes to cycle & soak 2-3 times a week in a 10-15 min for each zone. That's is where I notice the discrepancy in philosophy of experienced lawn experts such as yourself. Until then you should water a little more frequently with the objective of getting the water deep in the soil and backing off on the frequency. Short bursts of water on a daily basis is the worst case. It encourages weeds and promotes disease. You should have been watering new sod 2x-3x per day for a short time each - just enough to keep the roots moist while they knit into the underlying soil. Allowing it to go every other day might have been a problem. Reality was the irrigation folks set the sprinklers initially to water deep & almost everyday during the grow-in period. We finally realized this one month in & went to the 'tuna can' inputs & cut back the watering ourselves. That said, the damage may have already been done as we currently see some spots that have yellowing & unevening & divots with no grass growth in our overall lawn. Can you clarify what you mean in red above please? A bit confused here as it appears there is some contradiction with your recommendations ?? With that in mind, adding new sod now should be okay. The sooner the better since your old new sod does not have deep roots yet. Doesn't this counter the conventional wisdom of only planting during early spring & early fall? Do you have a lot of shade? Just wondering why fescue instead of a fescue mix with Kentucky bluegrass or full KBG? Our house is on a new lot with no mature trees of note & is 90% unshaded.

Tomorrow (Sunday) it's supposed to be up into the low 60s and sunny, so I am going to plant the above mentioned bulbs and etc.. This afternoon while I was outside hauling rocks, my Blue Tick Hound dog, Bonnie Belle, got one of the bags off the table, and chewed it up. I don't know if she ate any of the bulbs, but I only found three. The kittens may have batted them under the sofa. Don't know where the rest ended up. That concerned me, but she didn't get sick. Man, there was dirt all over the carpet and floor! She likes to chew up plastic bags. She must have had one swell time. What a mess!

Tiger Dawn, I second spraying with a hot pepper tea (you can make your own) or pepper wax (available commercially) or a garlic tea (make your own or buy a commercially available garlic spray). Hot pepper and garlic repel many critters, and hot pepper in particular repels squirrels. Kaolin clay, sold as Surround, also repels many critters because it puts a filmy, dusty-looking clay powder on the surface of the plants, but I don't have problems with squirrels, so don't know if it works on them. I hope you have a good plan for the control of cucumber beetles, squash bugs, and squash vine borers, because with that many cucurbits, you're likely to see a lot of all of them and maybe pickleworms as well if they're a problem in your area. (I don't have pickleworms here, or at least haven't so far, knock on wood.) Some years I have grown several dozen varieties of cucurbits all in the same year, and it brought droves of the aforementioned pests in great numbers. I grow a lot less of each type of cucurbit now in an effort to keep the pest numbers manageable. Paula, I've found hot pepper works only if sprayed onto the seed as a liquid since sprinkling it in doesn't coat the seeds. You can buy bird seed that's been commercially sprayed and it is even better than the seed you spray yourself in terms of repelling squirrels. Squirrels don't bother us much in the summer (must be all the acres of trees are providing them with what they want) but will occasionally come into the chicken coop area in the winter looking for stray seed. I seldom see them at the bird feeders, and suspect the feeders are too close to the dogs for the squirrels to raid them (unless they're doing it at night). Dawn

I never trimmed the one I kept one year. It got about three feet tall the second year. Most of the leaves were a very dark green with only a smaller display of the red bracts. The yellow real flowers were beautiful. It was in a dark green ceramic pot and I really liked it much better than the ones you buy. I forgot to water it last summer and it didn't make it. I really need to do one again. I didn't cover it, but kept it outside all summer and into late fall.