It snowed? I waisted my time digging out the shovel---just had to put it away, again.........(SCIA here) we missed the snow, again. :-)

1. Get a Weed Hound tool at any of the box stores. That tool will pull a bunch of tap rooted weeds as fast as you can step on them. 2. Reset your mower for the highest setting and take off the bag. Most weed seedlings cannot penetrate the shade provided by tall grass. Even established dandelions can disappear when the grass grows up tall around them (it pushes up their big broad leaves and they don't get enough sun). By recycling the cut grass to your yard, you recycle a lot of nitrogen. 3. Water deeply and infrequently. Deeply means for an hour or so each time. The normal recommendation is to water an inch per week. That depends on your soil but 1 inch per week is a great starting point. Infrequently means you only water once a week during the hottest part of summer. Now you should be watering more like monthly or every few weeks. This gives the soil surface a chance to completely dry out. Weed seeds need nearly continual moisture to sprout. By breaking the water cycle the soil surface and weed seeds dry out. 3. Fertilize with your favorite fertilizer regularly. If you need to spray weeds (and you may not after doing 2 and 1 above), use a spray on product like Weed-B-Gone to spot-spray each weed rather than spreading the granules. See if you can pawn off the weed-n-feed you already bought. Those products do not work like you think they do. They appeal to our desire for all-in-one solutions to multiple problems, but in this case it really doesn't work. Here's why. Weeds need to be growing and healthy to absorb the herbicide in the wnf products. The herbicide goes to work quickly but if the weeds were not already fertilized, they don't absorb the herbicide. The fertilizer may or may not go to work quickly but it doesn't go to work fast enough to affect the weeds before they herbicide dissipates. So basically the timing of the product is all mixed up. Since you already have the stuff, and you probably don't hate anyone enough to give it to them, you can make the best of the situation by fertilizing your yard with a cheap organic material 3 weeks prior to using the wnf. That will give your weeds (if you still have any) the nutrition/health they need to really absorb the herbicide when it hits the soil. You don't have to worry about any organic/synthetic interactions or over fertilizing. The two materials work on different principles. You won't technically "need" the fert from the wnf but it should not hurt anything. The organic fertilizer I would suggest would be ordinary corn meal. The application rate is 10-20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. A free alternative is to apply used Starbucks coffee grounds (they give them to you in huge bags). The theoretical application rate is the same except the coffee grounds will be wet. For wet coffee grounds use 20-40 pounds per 1,000 square feet.

Asking a bunch of lawn wackos whether you should hire somebody to take care of your lawn is probably not going to get a lot of endorsements for the lawn service. I used a lawn service for the first year I owned my house and my thinking was much along the same lines as yours. I'd get a professional service to get rid of the weeds and get my grass healthy and after that, I'd be able to do it on my own. I think they said that they used a specific set of chemicals that they sprayed that was tailored to my lawn and its needs, but the truck that they brought around had a big tank on it and they used the same tank on every lawn. When they would come by, they'd leave a notice on the door with recommendations for how often to cut, water, etc based on the conditions they noted in my lawn. But it was the same every time, regardless of the temperature, rainfall, etc. To top it off, the weed situation was no better than before and may have even gotten worse. I also wasn't really comfortable with the little flags they'd put out telling me to keep children and pets off the lawn for a minimum of X days because of the treatments. So I took matters into my own hands. I read things from the extension offices and started doing things that are pretty close to what gets recommended around here. Things started improving. Then I found various lawncare forums and things got even better. One humorous (or maddening?) thing happened a few years after I stopped using the lawn care service. A sprinkler head broke and a section of the lawn went dormant because it wasn't getting any water (the only water lawns get here is from sprinklers). One of the lawncare services pulled up and told me that I had a serious grub problem and needed to treat it right away. They went out to the area that was dormant and started pulling up sections of grass and telling me that it was due to grubs. I knew it was because of lack of water and suggested that as the cause, and they started launching into an explanation of why they knew that wasn't it. I then turned on the sprinkler in that section and showed them that it wasn't working, but they still tried to tell me it was grubs. Anyway, the main things you want to do are the following: Water deeply and infrequently. Apply an inch of water a week, but only water once a week if you can (in the desert, I often have to water twice a week, or once every 5 days, anyway). Adjust the amount (or the frequency) you water for any rainfall. This has a couple of benefits. First, it promotes deep roots, so the grass can better deal with periods of drought. I call grass a lazy plant, because it will only put down roots as deeply as it needs to for the water it gets. If the top inch of soil is always wet, the grass will have roots that are only an inch deep. Second, letting the ground dry between waterings will discourage weed seeds from germinating, because they need moisture to germinate. Mulch mow and mow at the highest setting of your mower and never cut more than 1/3 of the blade at one time. Mulch mowing returns water and nutrients to the soil and improves the health of the soil. It doesn't contribute to thatch and can actually contribute to getting rid of it. Mowing at the highest setting helps to make the grass stronger because it gives more surface area for photosynthesis. It also helps shade the surface so the roots are better able to deal with heat and drought. Also, it helps keep weeds from thriving because the weeds need sunlight. Fertilize once in the spring and twice in the fall. If you're using weed killers, don't use the weed and feed products (another reason I don't like the services--the one size fits all means they fertilize and kill weeds at the same time). Instead, spot spray weeds that you see sprout up. As for the lime, did they do a soil test? If not, there's no way to know whether lime is needed. Some areas tend to have low pH soils, but you don't know what the prior owner did. The prior owner may have applied lime regularly and heavily and raised the pH too high. If so, I wouldn't do anything to lower the pH because that will happen anyway, but you need to know if it needs lime before adding it. I guess my comment on the grubs is similar. Do you have grubs? If not, the grub treatment makes a lot more sense for the lawn service than it does for you.

Why the delay on lawn care this spring? The most important thing I believe is mowing. You should mow now and only take off 1/3rd of the grass blade. If you let it get any longer chances are it might start thinning out, and later you'd be cutting too much off. I'd cut this weekend, and then next weekend spray the ground ivy. You'll want to spray it when it starts getting its purple flowers anyway because thats one of its weak times during the growing season. Use weed-b-gon max, as that will be the one that will nail the ground ivy. I'd spray and then core aerate as if you core aerate first, the cores might be covering the plant.