If you have access to the box blade, THAT IS THE WAY TO PROCEED. Yes I was yelling. STOMP STOMP! HINT HINT! Do not consider any other approach. This is the wisdom of the ages speaking. By that I mean I have been reading this forum for nearly 10 years. When I was in college I worked for a landscaper. The box blade is what you want. For a successful bermuda installation, you want as little deep disturbance to the soil structure as you can possibly get. The box blade only affects the surface, so that's what you want. All approaches that involve digging, loosening, spading, forking, or anything else penetrating more than an inch will screw things up. You did not say where you live but bermuda is a hot season grass. If you are going to sod it, then you can do that any time. If you are going to seed it, wait until late June or July for best results. I know you want to get going but if you do it now, you will be writing in from now until June with second thoughts and frustrations of getting it to sprout. The only thing you will have by May is a yard full of weeds. Wait it out.

I am converting from fescue/common bermuda to Patriot bermuda this summer. The common is taking over my lawn and I want a nice bermuda if I am going to have it. A PhD turfgrass extension/research specialist did bring up a very important point to consider. He suggested that I till to a depth of 4' to 6' and here is why. He stated that RU will kill the top portion of the plant but not the rhizomes underneath the ground that are laying dormant. By tilling, it brings the rhizomes to the surface. Upon doing this he suggested to wait 2-3 weeks after tilling. When/if the rhizomes begin to generate new shoots hit it again with another blast of RU or equivalent. One thing he stressed, and others on this board have too. Hit the bermuda with a shot of nitrogen 2 weeks prior to applying RU to really get it growing. When you apply the RU hit it with Roundup Pro or generic equivalent and the full 4 quart per acre rate. He stated that if you merely make it sick it will not take in any more RU, unlike other herbicides. When the rhizomes begin to grow shoots hit it with the 3% solution of the 4 lb per gallon RU. He stated that he once was unable to till on his property due to erosion issues and fought killing the rhizomes with RU for a long time since he was unable to till. To be sure, I DO NOT want to till. But, given the tendencies I have experienced with my lawn, I am considering it. I once thought my neighbors bermuda was encroaching on my lawn, which it is in some areas. However, base on his information, I now think that some of the once-dormant rhizomes are a big reason why I now have widespread bermuda showing up and choking out my fescue. I have only lived here a year and can only speculate what the previous owner did. But, both of my neighbors have the same bermuda that I have and am left wondering if my lawn was at one time the same. I do not want to till for other reasons too. But, if I have a choice to till and fight leveling or not till and fight this darn common bermuda I think I would choose to deal with leveling. This is just my opinion but I really want to do all that I can to get minimize it. He did state that if the bermuda was not that widespread in my lawn then he would not see a need to till as he does recognize that there is a great deal of extra work involved. Given this, I guess each person has to make his own determination of what might be right given their own individual circumstances. That's what I am fighting with now.

It will take 3 weeks but this will help a lot. Water it every day, 3x per day, to germinate all the weed seeds that will germinate this time of year. Do that for a week and you should have 80% of them sprouted. Then hit it with Roundup. Keep watering and hit it with Roundup one more time a week after the first. Grading is not done with a rototiller. Grading is done with a box blade on the back of a tractor like this... Your rototilled soil will get bumpier and bumpier for the next 3 years until it is finally settled. You can level it then, but it is always preferable to not do the damage in the first place. It is a lot of work to do by hand. Rototilling is usually only recommended by magazine writers. They are writers; not lawn experts. Real landscapers always use the tractor and only disturb the soil right at the surface.

High magnesium can give otherwise normal soil the sense of being clayey. That's about the extent of my soil chemistry knowledge so I like to slip that in when I can '- ) Up there where morph said your soil test didn't make sense...that's why we suggest going to Logan Labs. Their $25 test is so comprehensive that those with morph's background can make sense out of it. I suspect your soil is hard and turns mucky when wet. Those are two different issues but make people believe they have a clay based soil. Hard soil can be fixed with shampoo applied at a rate of 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet. Follow up with deep watering. Repeat in 2 weeks if the soil does not soften when moist. You can repeat as often as you like with no problems. Morph did not get into how he makes his lawn(s) look like that. Here's the basics: Redo the entire lawn with an Elite Kentucky bluegrass mix. Once the grass is established, water deeply and infrequently. Mow KBG at or near the highest setting (he uses a mowing robot). Fertilize with organics all season long and make the last app a high N, fast release synthetic fert. Once a year get a Logan Labs soil test and rebalance the micronutrients as indicated. Note that there is nothing special about what he does. There are no secret formulas, expensive products, magic methods, or any of that. There is no routine use of herbicides, insecticides, or fungicides. He'll tell you that #5 is very important. In my opinion the soil test is much more important if have tried everything and nothing seems to work. But if you want the nicest lawn on the block, then it becomes important. The last picture belongs to a friend of mine in SoCal (Huntington Beach). He's not a grass guru by any means. He does what I tell him and nothing else. I told him about mowing high, deep/infrequent watering, and organics. All of a sudden his mediocre lawn became what you see. It's Kentucky bluegrass. He can get away with KBG in SoCal because he's just a few miles from the beach. He fertilizes with used coffee grounds once in the spring. Coffee grounds and corn meal are the two worst organic fertilizers there are next to compost. The protein value is rock bottom, but they do have some value. Here is another picture of his house from Google Earth. His lawn is the nicest on his block, and he doesn't know what he's doing. You'd have to look pretty hard to find a nicer one. It really is as simple as what morph does and what we've been preaching for years.