You are in the Ponds & Aquatics Forum. You probably want to post your remarks and questions in the Lawn Care Forum, link below. Here is a link that might be useful: Lawn Care at iVillage GardenWeb

Well, I think the idea of kinkless depends on what you consider a kink. I think most hose makers consider a kink as being one that occurs at the faucet when the hose is pulled too tightly the opposite way. So there are several out there with supports built in at the hook up to prevent this. My idea of a kink is when you have pulled it all the way around the house to find you have no water and backtrack halfway around and find a kink (or two or three or four) in the actual hose where it has bent and shut of the flow of water. That said, I'm beginning to think that there is no such hose that will not kink in the hose itself. I just got back from Lowe's where I purchased two Swan Soft and Supple hoses (100 ft for $37). As I was unwinding them and stretching them out they kinked. So now it will be a test as to how well they stand up to being dragged hither and yon and to the crazy Missouri winters.

Thank you Carol and summersrhythm, I agree with the "can't keep up with the weeds" because everyday I do a stroll I seem to have to pull little seedlings out around my plants and they just continue to grow and grow. We live next to wetlands as well and there are tons of native grasses and plants and those seeds end up blowing in with the wind. I would be so much more at ease with grass to smother out some of the weeds. Every year I have a huge job at the beginning of spring. I may want to try that cardboard or newspaper technique next year instead of digging it all up. Probably just use a string cutter than lay the cardboard over the top and mulch. The digging is so much work, and I have 4 kiddos as well, and it's hard to find the time to complete it every year. Well thank you all for your kindness and compliments! The passion is real here. I love browsing this forum for all of the pictures of other people's roses and hard work. They all are so beautiful!

That looks like a fungal disease. As you noted, it's rained a lot. While unusual for October, newer lawns are certainly going to be the ones that get them. I just had pretty much the same issue on another lawn, much further south, but your problem is much worse, you don't have much time left on the clock, and so I'm not going to copy that advice here. At that point, try DiseaseEx from the Home Depot and ignore anything any salesperson says. It's a wide-spectrum curative, will prevent fungus for 2 weeks, and that should give you enough time to start moving into winter. Expect losses with that much damage, on a young lawn, and with having to apply a fungicide (although I chose the most gentle one I could with a wide spectrum) both on a young lawn and just before a Michigan winter. You did catch this about as early as you could, it's just that this went pretty far pretty fast. Strictly secondary, but it's more likely that your ion balance is out of whack. We have a saying around here that basically reads, "You don't have clay soil." :-) Although about 2% of people actually do, it's exceedingly rare, and even then, it's usually a clay loam, which is not clay. If it drains that poorly, a soil test from Logan Labs would be in order, as the ion balance is probably quite poor (as I noted). That can be fixed.