Well, you have been getting advice that conflicts with what we have learned here over the years. You say you want to do everything right. Here are the lessons learned from years of reading Internet gardening forums. 1. NEVER rototill in preparation for laying seed or sod. 2. You can sod any day of the year. 3. Palmetto is a relatively poor variety. Floratam is the one you really want. So that bad news is that you wasted time and money preparing the soil. The good news is you can still have the best looking lawn in the neighborhood starting from where you are. Before the sod arrives, go out and water the soil completely. Water for at least an hour. This will settle the soil that is currently fluffy. After the soil settles some, level it again using a rake or filling in with sand/soil. Try not to raise the surface of the soil by blanket top dressing. All you want to do is fill the holes. Then water it again to settle the new surface. You can get the most level surface by dragging a piece of weighted chain link fence over the soil. That tool will loosen the high spots and drag high soil into the low spots that you cannot see. Then after your sod goes down, rent a water fillable roller to push the sod down to the surface of the soil. Roots from the sod will not grow through the air to reach the soil. The sod has to be touching everywhere. Since you cannot afford a sprinkler, go to Home Depot and get a Vigoro water hose timer. Then get as many oscillating sprinklers as you need to cover your lawn all at the same time. Then go to Sears and get Craftsman brand hoses to connect to the timer and the sprinklers (Sears' hoses do not leak at the fittings if you tighten them properly). You might need splitters to feed all the hoses out of the timer. I like the big green and black ones from Lowe's. Set your timer to go off every day, morning, noon, and night, for 10 minutes each time. You need to do this so the sod will knit to the underlying soil. If you do this for three weeks, the roots will be in and you're off to the races. After the roots are in you can back off on the watering. Ultimately you want to back off to watering once every week in the summer heat and once or twice a month the rest of the year. Use your timer to do this. I was going to lose my lawn this year until I got the timer rigged up. Mulch mow St Augustine at the mower's highest setting. Weld the adjusters in place so that your well meaning brother in law doesn't come by some day to do you a favor and he scalps your nice lawn. St Aug never needs to be scalped. Just mowing at the highest setting will give you the best looking lawn in the neighborhood. I fertilize with organic fertilizer 5 times per year on the federal holidays. I start on Washington's Birthday and end on Thanksgiving. If you use synthetic you can follow the same schedule except skip 4th of July...and also don't do the first one until after you have mowed real grass for the second time in the spring. If you don't want to spend the money on new hoses, cut the male ends of your current hoses off and replace them with the black plastic repair ends from Lowe's. The stamped brass fittings are the worst. The Sears brass fittings are slightly better. I really prefer the black plastic male fittings for all my hoses. They seal tight every time.

You picked a doozy of a topic to reference. I don't think I've ever seen so many people piggybacking onto one thread. The spots you see on your grass are the same as those I posted in that other topic. The corn meal should help. Give it 3 full weeks. This is not a shade issue or a watering issue. St Aug will be thinner in the shade but it should be healthy looking with zero spots or yellow blades. Here's a picture of my lawn in San Antonio growing in deeper shade than you had. The point of this picture is 1) no spots, and 2) lots of shade. I took this picture to illustrate chlorosis in St Augustine caused by too much rain. The yellow blades in the center are from the rain. The point you cannot see is that this area looked horrible a month earlier from disease. You could see the soil, leaves, stolons, and spots on the few living blades of grass. Note that you can still see through the turf a little to the stolons underneath. If this was in full sun it would be so packed in the blades would be growing straight up. I'll get a picture of my new lawn in Bandera looking straight down. It's very hard to push a mower through that stuff. Okay I have to comment on the TAMU pamphlet on growing St Augustine. Generally when I see something from TAMU I read it and do the opposite. Truth! Here's my experience this year. I live in Bandera now, so think Texas Hill Country. Our temps ran in the mid to high 90s this year. We got our first rain on Memorial Day and it nearly washed my belongings out of the garage. It was 11 inches in 3 days with most coming the first night. That's too much rain so I was expecting to get some disease. I did but only about 1 square foot was affected. But since Memorial Day I have watering the actual grass one time. Fortunately we got some rain relief last week, so from June 1 to Aug 19 I did not water. Had I followed TAMU I would have watered it every 5 days. Had I followed my own advice (below) I would have watered it every 7 days. What the TAMU people did was over simplify watering, but then they went into too much detail on how to achieve the simple watering. Watering is slightly harder than they suggest but setting it up is easier than they suggest. Here's my take on watering after reading and moderating lawn forums for 10 years. Watering: Deep and infrequent is the mantra for watering. This is for all turf grass all over the place. Deep means 1 inch all at one time. Put some cat food or tuna cans around the yard, and time how long it takes your sprinkler(s) to fill all the cans. Memorize that time. That will be the time you water from now on. My hose, sprinkler and water pressure takes 8 full hours to fill the cans. Your time will likely be less. I like gentle watering. As for watering frequency, that depends on the daytime air temperature. With temps in the 90s, deep water once per week. With temps in the 80s, deep water once every 2 weeks. With temps in the 70s, deep water once every 3 weeks. With temps below 70, deep water once a month. Note that you have to keep up with quickly changing temps in the spring and fall. This deep and infrequent schedule works in Phoenix and in Vermont, so it should work for you. The reason for deep and infrequent is to grow deeper, more drought resistant roots and to allow the soil to dry completely at the surface for several days before watering again. If it rains, reset your calendar to account for the rainfall. I guess I should add that if it rains 11 inches, reset your calendar back by a month at least. Mowing height. If you read the topic you referenced you saw pix of my dog in the tall grass. (We found her and she's up at the new house in Bandera). From those pictures you can see that tall St Aug is pretty healthy. I seriously did not water, mow, fertilize, or weed that lawn from October 2011 through Feb of 2015. All it got was rainfall. 2011 and 2013 were drought years, and it thrived. Point is keep your st Aug as tall as you can stand it. Set the mower to the highest setting and weld it in place. Contrary to what TAMU says, mowing it low does not make a better turf. Fertilizing. If I was on a rigorous fertilizer schedule I would use organics 5x per year following the federal holiday schedule (Washington's birthday, Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving). If I was on a casual schedule I would fertilize on Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving. If you decide not to use organic fertilizer, I would still strongly suggest you use it at least once a year in addition to, or in lieu of, one of your fertilizer apps. The general experience of the universe of lawn care websites is that lawns that get no organics for 10 years or so will develop issues where the chemical fertilizer seems to not be effective. One dose of organics will reset the soil biology and the chemical fertilizers will work again. I think you can avoid that issue by preempting it. Organic fertilizer is much less expensive per 1,000 square feet than compost. The fertilizer is also much easier to apply than compost.

Looks like it to me. Here is a link to some more information, which you might have already found. I would assume the grass came with the disease which got much worse with the rain. Take a note and don't buy grass from that supplier again. Being an organic kind of guy, I would be hitting the grass with ordinary corn meal at 15 pounds per 1,000 square feet every 3-4 weeks for the rest of the summer. This is INSTEAD of using a fungicide. As discussed in the link above, this is a soil borne disease. These problems are caused by an imbalance of beneficial versus pathogenic microbes - essentially an unhealthy soil. The fastest way to restore the soil to health is to use organic fertilizer, NOT fungicide. Corn meal has the additional benefit of heavily populating the soil with a predatory, but beneficial fungus called Trichoderma (try koh DER mah). Not all fungi cause disease. If you cannot find ordinary corn meal at your local feed stores (call first), then cracked corn will work. If you cannot find either one, then look for a grocery store catering to the Hispanic market. They will have 25-pound bags of corn flour. They will also have 25-pound bags of tortilla ready-mix which has baking soda and baking powder in it. The bags are almost identical, but you want the plain corn flour. Ask for help if you cannot tell them apart. If you have any doubts about the effectiveness of organic fertilizer, please ask. I think you ran into an unfortunate weather situation - unlucky timing. The grass could have been afflicted before you bought it, but that's hard to prove. It may have a guarantee or you might get a discount on buying again from the same supplier.

Hi all I laid down a new lawn of St augustine sod 4 weeks ago and I want to know how long I should wait before I can mow it for the first time? It's thriving well it's the greenest yard in the neighborhood but it's already at 6 inches in some areas. Is 4 weeks to soon to mow. I wanted to wait 8 weeks but if I wait that long I'm afraid I'm going to have a jungle.