I'm not that familiar with Bermuda grass culitivation, as Fescue is my lawn mainstay. Fescue, and I would think Bermuda as well, does require several years of growth before it's really established as a great lawn.

If you're impatient with seed, then try sod in those areas that you want more instant satisfaction.

Look into other groundcovers besides grass. Down south there are a lot more groundcover options than Pachys.

That is too many pictures, just overwhelming. I suggest you pick one area that you want to focus on and post only 2 or 3 photos of it to ask questions about. You can ask about different areas separately, but all at once it's just too much and many of the photos seem redundandt.

It appears that the lawn problems are your first concern. Have you spent some time studying back pages on the Organic Lawn Forum? Many useful tips there about growing Bermuda and other southern grasses. Have you tried sprigging St. Augustine? Much cheaper than sodding. Please tell me you will not try to take those pines down by yourself! Note that the professional tree people approach them with caution during removal. Unpredictable! We just had a very ancient one break off about 4' from the ground on a clear, calm day. It crashed across the back yard, across a cart path just missing some golfers, shattering on the 18th tee. Examining the break we found the pine to be healthy with no sign of beetles or borers. So, I know why you want your pines removed, just let the pros do the job.

I agree, too many photos. And I also second posting one or two of them on the Organic Lawn Care Forum.

I surfed through that in desparation a couple of seasons ago - and although my conditions, grass types, etc. are light years away from yours - I gleaned enough information on the use of homemade compost as a topdress and a broadcasting of alfalfa meal pellets in combination with some adequate rainfall to bring some patchy lawn areas and browning, sparse banks back to something quite lush.

And on the economic side, the rain and compost were free and a 50 lb. bag of alfalfa pellets was a little under $11 at a feed & grain store.

"My biggest problem is money, I dont have a bunch to fully sod the back and side areas with St. Augustine, nor can I hire someone to remove the nasty pines or do this task for me."

Oh, goodness, you don't have to do it in solid sod! You can checkerboard it or sprig it, and St. Augustine will fill in beautifully if it gets deep watering once a week once it's established--twice a week only if the weather it REALLY brutal.

Burmuda won't ever be a very good lawn in back there, and rye's pretty much mainly good for people who want winter green. St. Augustine will choke out any weeds handily once it gets established--a truly well-maintained lawn will battle down even dandelions. Plus, it'll do great in the shade--anything that isn't REALLY deep. That's really the way to go. I'd sprig the front, too, and let it slowly take over. Once it's established, there's nothing as tough. The weeniness of fescues and bluegrass came as a deep disappointment to me. :-) (Though I do like that I don't have to water them in the summer if I'm willing to let them get a bit wilty...)

I think if it takes constant watering and feeding to get the lawn to thrive, replace it with something that likes the conditions. It's a much more environmentally friendly approach, and saves time and money, too.

We have given up on lawn where it does not want to grow easily. Too expensive to water and feed. Look into ground covers for your area.
There is also the concept of 'freedom lawn' for backyards and side yards: let grow whatever grows and mow it regularly so that the children can play on it.

In addition to the time and money involved in keeping a manicured lawn green all summer, there is the runoff of fertilizer into streams and lakes to consider. Never mind the other chemicals that are often used on lawns, like pesticides and herbicides. I overseed my lawn with clover, which adds nitrogen to the soil. Between that nitrogen, and the clippings I leave on with the mulching mower, I rarely need to use any fertilizer at all, and the clover stays green when the grass turns brown in a drought. I don't water either.

Saypoint, hun, you're from CONNECTICUT. If you haven't got the least idea of how southern lawns work, don't venture an opinion.

St. Augustine takes a weekly deep watering. It does NOT go dormant in hot periods, so when people ignorant of how the grass grows move into a house, they kill it, almost without exception. It DIES. Get it? DEAD. GONE. FOREVER. Not dormant. D-E-A-D. In a few weeks, it's bare dirt.

People from more northern states also typically cut St. Augustine WAY too short. It needs to be 3" long so that it requires only 1" of water per week during the growing season. The cuttings should be mulched. I cannot understand why so many people move to the South and then wonder why they kill their lawn...after cutting it to 1" or 1.5" and carefully removing all cutting from the lawn as if they'll cause it to explode or something. I've had to adjust to a number of new places, but that's the kind of thing you find out about right away.

It takes a relatively long time for St. Augustine to get established, but once established, it takes little-to-no fertilizer/weed killer and chokes out everything else. It never, of course, has to be reseeded--on the contrary, you spend more energy (muscular, not chemical) keeping it from creeping into the flower beds than you do trying to make it greener/fuller/thicker/whatever.

Now, where I currently live, "if it's green, mow it and call it a lawn" works okay 80% of the time. If you do that in the South, not only do you end up with something that isn't green, you end up with something full of stickers--"burrs" or "prickles" or whatever to other parts of the country. You can't walk in it without shoes and high socks. Kids can't play on it. Thoughtlessly putting a hand down results in a palm full of very painful hooked stickers that you then get to pull out, one by one. So it's all well and good to sniff about the ethics of yards (and, puh-LEESE, not one gardener in 200 has any real moral high ground on THAT--and I was probably one of them in NM, with my lawnless yard and xeric beds!)--but you're not the one who ends up with an unliveable space that not even the dog wants to cross.

In the South, where water usually isn't a problem but where the amount of fertilizer/weed control necessary to get other types of lawns to be thick enough to choke out problematical sticker-bearing plants is enormous, St. Augustine is the best choice for a lawn you can actually play on, sit on, and touch. The only other *reasonable* alternative is to seed with something you can scalp so short that the weeds can't get tall enough to bear many stickers--and the result is thin, shocky grass that STILL needs lots of water to keep from shriveling up and blowing away as a result of the trauma of being cut so short in such frequently brutal weather.

In the side yard, if there's little traffic, jasmine or an ivy (English, whatever) would be a great ground cover lawn replacement. Unfortunately, there's nothing suitable for that region that can take a lot of foot traffic *and* choke out weeds. Ground covers tend to work best in shade in that region as a whole, anyway--less competition. A path or steppingstones can provide access between the front and back yards, if needed.

Now, where I've moved to, it takes less water but is going to take quite a bit more other sorts of care to get the lawn back into good shape that I HOPE can be maintained with little additional treatment--of any sort. I did no watering at all this summer, just to see what would happen, and I discovered that certain areas are going to have to be watered to keep the crabgrass and wild strawberry from completely taking over. (Crabgrass, being an annual, leaves part of the yard vulnerable to severe erosion in winter. Not good.) I've had to overseed most of the yard, which requires a light fertilizing for proper germination, and I'm going to have to apply a targeted crabgrass germination suppressor come spring, followed by an overseeding of the too-crabgrassy areas (which requires fertilizer, again....) and some limited watering during the driest times of the year for the sunniest sloped part of the yard. Then, come fall, I'll overseed the whole thing again and see if I can get enough thickness that I can cut down on fertilizing and overseeding to once a year or less often.

And pesticides? I had to use those here, too--the fourth time someone picked up a tick. Wildlife's great, but all the deer bring "friends" with them, and when you can get a laundry list of tick-borne diseases, prevention is the wiser course. So we treated the zones of the yard that got the heaviest kid-traffic (the hill they roll down, the area where they play ball, and the swingset) and left the other 75% alone. Not the ideal situation, but better than a kid getting Lyme disease, certainly.

I'd really like to see how overseeding with clover would prevent a kid from catching Lyme disease.

Wow, where did that come from?

All she said was that if the conditions are making it rough, (s)he might want to use something that suits the conditions. Then a little anecdote of how she does that in her conditions.

Lyme disease got its name from Lyme, Connecticut by the way.

Actually, I lived in the South for a number of years. I consider one inch of water a week a lot of water, when you consider that clean drinking water is becoming a precious commodity, even if you can afford to waste it on the lawn. I would not let my dogs play on a lawn that has been treated with pesticides, and yes, Old Lyme is across the river from my house, almost within shouting distance.

I live beside a fragile wetland ecosystem, on a river estuary next to the Sound, but even if I didn't, I would try to be as gentle on the planet as I could. There are, indeed, a lot of people who consider the water, fertilizer, and chemicals required to keep a lawn looking manicured irresponsible, and this way of thinking is catching on.

Canada has a program that promotes (or maybe even requires, I forget) alternatives to the "perfect lawn". Groundcovers as an alternative, or at least using organic amendments and fertilizers, and only in the amount they are needed as verified by soil testing, and pulling weeds instead of spreading herbicides, are all ways that any homeowner can be more responsible.

I didn't expect the OP to plant clover, I was sharing my own lawn care philosophy, as you did, but with a much longer and more convoluted post about your MD lawn that doesn't apply to his zone any more than my clover does.

And don't call me "hun", it's very condescending.

Ground cover is, I agree, appropriate to many situations. Prolly not to this one, though, given the OP's concern about his lawn. (He'll likely have to give up having any gorgeous grass in that sideyard.)

Whether water is precious depends on where you are. Dallas? Yes. BUT...you don't need St. Augustine in Dallas. All hail Bermuda grass there! Houston? Rarely is there a drought severe enough to cause a temporary water concern. As for there, St. Augustine or "stickers" are your choices. Mobile, AL, is another place that needs St. Augustine. And rain? Try the rainiest city in the lower 48!

Different regions have different concerns--some have water concerns, while fertilizer runoff is a lot more troublesome in others. (Apparently, the strawberries that annoy me so in my grass? A noxious invasive exotic. Great. Suggestions for getting rid of them or even controlling them? Pretty darned feeble, as far as I can tell.) Trying to nurse a lawn that won't ever do very well into a state of verdant, glowing health is going to do a lot more damage than watering a lawn up to two times a week in August in many places.

1" per week *includes* natural rainfall and only applies to the growing season, BTW. Areas that need St. Augustine that I've lived in have ranged from 36 to more than 40 inches of rain per year, on average. That's not much water. It's less than I had to put on my "xeric" plants in NM while they were getting established. (You should have seen me panicking when I first planted them and they started to wither even though I was watering them, in my mind, "all the time"--meaning once a week. *snort* Yes, in a high-wind, high-elevation, semi-desert environment!)

I am ALL for choosing a low-maintenance ground cover--*where it works*. I haven't found a single satisfactory replacement for a lawn for kids to play on. I've looked. "Light to medium foot traffic" groundcovers won't do it, though goodness knows I wish they would. And many people live in areas in which replacing a "merely decorative" front yard is either culturally unacceptable--take that as you will--or is actually explicitly restricted by covenants or zoning laws. And that's assuming that the OWNERS like them. In those cases, the best you can do is make large beds which you can try to make as low-maintenance as possible. (Honestly, for 9/10ths or more of people, high maintenance is a bad idea from any standpoint, anyway. Vacations, boredom, illness, business--all of these things would intervene in a strict routine of trimming, spraying, fertilizing, etc., etc., to such an extent that the landscape would soon look pretty pathetic. And so often does! I am WAY too lazy to do that and bitterly, bitterly disappointed that I'll have to water the slope in back next year at least four times to keep back that $%# crab grass.)

As for Lyme disease--I'd rather not have my kids--or the neighbors' kids--get it by playing in my yard. I can check myself after going out. I can trust other adults to do it, too. Stripping down elementary schoolers every time they go outside--and in summer, they're banging in and out all the time--is practically insane, but it was the only alternative to treating the 1/8th of an acre that's the major play area last year. We had started averaging, literally, a tick a week. I looked up the incidence of tick-borne diseases in our area, and the statistics were NOT good. Now, I hate using pesticides. This was the first time that I'd personally applied them. I'm killing all sorts of critters I'd LOVE to have in my back yard, but if it's that or a sick kid, I'm grabbing my bag of pesticide.

Of course, I COULD just keep the deer out somehow. If you can suggest an effective and economical way of keeping deer out of a 2-acre spread, part of which is wetland, please do! *g* I mean really, I'd love to know, 'cuz I have an azalea that's looking bedraggled nearly 2 years after some young buck decided that it was an all-you-can-eat salad bar for several week running.

I have another question, though, purely hypothetical at this point. In one area I lived in, we wouldn't get a hard freeze once every four years or so. And in those years, no matter how we treated the dogs (pills, sprays, collars, what-have-you), they would bring in hundreds of fleas--dozens with every trip outside--that would set up home and eat people and pets constantly. The dogs went piebald with scratching, and we were covered in bites. How can you get rid of fleas at that level of infestation without using a pesticide? We did every de-flea-your-house trick known to man, BTW, from vacuuming more than once a day to the dust that dessicates them. After going through every other option the first year, my dad (who, BTW, has a master's degree in a wildlife field!) broke down and went the poison-the-yard route--which worked beautifully, knocking back the numbers hard enough that bites were rare rather than constant.

I do want to makes a BIG point about using "organics." Raw sewage is organic. It is also devastating to the environment. Soooo many gardeners like to make a big point about how they only use ORGANIC compost/worm castings/whatever on their plants. The streams really. don't. care. whether the nitrogen that gets dumped in them from your/my garden is from 100% certified premium organic sources or from cheapo-granulated nitrogen pellets. It doesn't make a difference! I like compost for all sorts of reasons, including reduced runoff and reduced chances of burning a plant because of slower release. But I don't pretend that there's "good organic nitrogen" and "bad inorganic nitrogen"--once it runs off, it's just plain ol' nitrogen.

Sorry for sounding condescending--it was meant to be a drawl. ;-)