Man!!!! are verticals ever susceptible to all the neighborhood noise I
simply don't hear on my dipoles in trees! Oh, well, xmit on the verticals
and receive on the horizontals. Or what?

Verticals are low angle beasts and "look" low and "see" all the man made
wundernoise. Horinontals look up the sky, where not much man mades.
If you need to listen on low bands for DX, the best thing is to use Flag or
Pennat RX antennas, they give some directivity and discrimination against noise
sources around. But you should notice decent improvement on DX esp. on
transmit.
There is really no need to wait for grass to grow tall, just tie the wire down
and you can move the lawn short, they wiill eventually "sink" into grass and
ground.

GL Yuri, K3BU