"so I don't think it is feasible getting a path to my front yard so it could drain to the street." I'm NOT AT ALL saying what's feasible. I'm ASKING for accurate information so we can determine what is feasible. So far, the information is vague. "...So I could direct water to one the neighbors yards but that would not be very nice." It's not as if you talk to water nicely, it will run any other way than downhill. We're not talking about funneling water in an unnatural way onto the downhill neighbor ... just letting it escape in a natural way from your yard. It is not your obligation to keep all water that enters your yard. Done in a "natural" way, letting it escape causes no harm. It is what everyone is doing ... and must do. If no one let water escape, all the rivers would run dry. And how nice would that be?

One of the frustrating things about lawns and water is that sometimes a lawn that looks like it is dying because it doesn't have enough water may be dying because it is drowning. I think there's a good chance that your problem is due to too much water. I live in the desert and I watered for the first time yesterday. We did have almost three inches of rain in June this year, but it sounds like you've had lots of rain, also. The areas that are affected may have poorer drainage or may be a little lower so that water sits there longer or they may just have some grass that is more susceptible to fungus. Don't water until the grass starts to get stressed, then water deeply. You need to let the soil dry out down to about 4 inches or so. If you can't tell by the grass, use a screwdriver and poke it into the ground to see how deep it's moist. I'm pretty sure at least one of those pictures shows some KBG, so if those areas have died, there's enough grass around them that is still green to fill in. I would not fertilize now, except maybe with a slow release fertilizer. Most organic fertilizers are slow release and there are some synthetic products that are also slow release. I don't have a lot of direct experience with fungus (it's just not a problem when the relative humidity usually hovers around 5%). I've read posts from others who have used cornmeal at 10-20 lbs per 1000 sq ft and had good results from it. That would also qualify as a slow release mild fertilizer. There are also synthetic anti fungal products available. I think the synthetic products are faster working. One important point is that you should not mix the two approaches. The cornmeal works by encouraging the growth of beneficial fungi, so if you use an anti-fungal application of some sort, the cornmeal won't work.

Jim, Right now I am watching a literal river going down my long dirt driveway and feeling despair over all the lost rose blooms and broken canes. There is a thunderstorm overhead which continues on with a 1 1/2 hr. torrential downpour. Earlier today was no doubt peak rose day for the old once-bloomers and I've been calling everybody all week to beg them to come up and see the roses. I have been waiting a year for this day, peak rose day for the old roses. With all the rain, today was the one decent day and the buds opened up and were breathtaking. Only a couple of people showed up so I was out snapping hundreds of photos since it has rained everyday all June and they were predicting thunderstorms. Now the blooms are all floating down the 'rivers' that run between the rosebushes and most of the bushes have just toppled completely over from the heavy, waterlogged blooms. My brother just called me to say that they were coming over to see the roses (finally) and I said "are you crazy? You're going to need an ark to get here!" He says its sunny at his house and they've been in the pool. We both have homes on mountains and he can see my mountain from his upper deck, just 6 miles away. He says "Celeste, I can see a black cloud sitting right over your mountain and can hear thunder and the weather radar shows a bad thunderstorm situated right over your mountain but nowhere else. It is sunny all around you!" Great. Even God likes my brother more. My roses are destroyed and my basement is flooded. Our bedroom is downstairs in the basement. It was already getting mildew down there from the constantly-wet ground, but now our carpet is soggy, our clothes are moldy, and the walls are damaged. Outside, the ground is so saturated from a month of rain, there is nowhere for the 3 inches that just fell to go and my lawn and gardens are under water. The modern roses will recover and bloom again, but the Old Rose season which had just barely began, is over. There are fallen petals floating everywhere. I am usually an optimistic person, but this is just ridiculous. Sigh. Celeste

[set soapbox mode on] Okay now I'm taking it personally. You can check all the sources you want, but I can assure you it becomes baffling almost immediately, especially if you spend much time reading peer reviewed university journal articles. What we have here in this and other forums is hundreds if not thousands of peers reviewing what we do and reviewing it in much less baffling terms. The text that I copy and paste is my own, so I don't need to site sources. When I came to this forum I was doing almost everything wrong. I was convinced I was fairly correct because I attended a land grant university and took classes covering this stuff. After a few heated forum battles I tried some of the things these illiterates were writing. Lo and behold they worked for me. After that I looked back at other suggestions my "opponents" were making. Some seemed counterintuitive, so I looked into the science soil biology. From that and what I had learned of human physiology in grad school, I created the Organic Lawn Care FAQ, available on the GW Organic Gardening FAQ section. I posted that FAQ on several sites. Those sites with download counters registered well over 75,000 downloads each. Nobody in the forums seemed to be arguing against my work, so I guess you could call that peer reviewed. My lawn owner peers - perhaps not your ivory tower peers. As a result of that document I was asked to moderate three new organic lawn care forums at other e-locations. Again I am calling this a reasonable review of the concepts I set forth. I consider the Organic Lawn Care FAQ the first easy to read concept document on organics since J.I Rodale popularized it in the 1950s. His compost approach was nice until we got the technology to study DNA in the soil. With testing done in the 90s and 2000s we learned that compost wasn't a be-all, end-all magic bullet. Compost is little more than a collection of microbes and microbe carcasses. It works great as a mulch. But the benefit to organics comes from feeding real food to the soil microbes. Then you'll have to read Dr. Elaine Ingham's Soil Biology Primer to learn how that food gets processed into plant food. While that document is not trivial reading, it is readable to us unwashed. What I try to provide is best practices for low hassle lawn care. These practices have been reviewed in other lawn forums and tuned up over the years. Yes there are ways to make it harder and more expensive, but I don't want to work that hard myself. I even copy and paste some of the things I have written, because that has a lower hassle factor than recreating it again and again. Every now and then something new happens in home owner lawn care. Two examples that come to mind are leveling and sprigging. Several years ago Dave Proud brought us an illustrated and detailed account of how he leveled his bermuda grass lawn. Before that we never discussed leveling to get rid of a bumpy surface. It was an epiphany. The lights went on and we dug into that. I got him to join another forum for lawn nuts, and the process has been used a lot. That general topic fed into the question of why lawns get bumpy. Rototilling was discussed among homeowners and professionals. Rototilling seems to be the root cause, or at least one root cause. Another fairly recent homeowner discovers is sprigging a few dollars worth of very expensive bermuda stolons onto bare soil. This process came to us from R. Simon in Australia. It seems like he developed the process and made it work. On this topic I do not know if anyone else has sprigged successfully. I spend more time in this forum where there are more beginners than I do in the other forum, so they could be sprigging all the time over there. My point is that if and when someone has a better idea about lawn care, I'm going to bring it to the forums and discuss it. Generally those ideas do not come from peer reviewed journals out of the universities. But if, for example, you want peer reviewed evidence that shampoo will soften your soil, search the journals for "Cascade Plus, golf course, core aeration." Without the quotes of course. You'll find plenty of articles on the use of a concentrated surfactant called Cascade Plus being used to replace core aeration on golf courses. Shampoo is also a concentrated surfactant. I did not invent the use of shampoo, but when I tried it, and it worked like magic for me, I was all over it. Please go ahead and look at all the sources you want. Come back with your ideas and we can talk about them. I have reasons for not top dressing, not core aerating, not rototilling, and all the other oddball stuff I suggest. You don't have to believe them or agree. You are free to present your thoughts, but what irks me is when people refuse to spend $0.50 on shampoo but they will spend $75 to rent a back breaking machine that will not work nearly as well. ...all because they read a peer reviewed journal about core aerating. [set soapbox off]