Start with a soil treatment that will soften your soil and allow water to penetrate much better. Your soil is not compacted - it is hard. Those are different. The treatment is to spray any clear, generic shampoo at a rate of 3 ounces (or more) per 1,000 square feet followed up by 1 inch of irrigation. Watch carefully for runoff. Stop watering immediately if you see it flowing off. The soap is supposed to stop that. If you apply the soap, water, and it still runs off, water more slowly. You still need to get an inch on but move the sprinklers and let the water that's there soak deep into the soil before watering there again. Repeat this every other week until you are happy. The expected result will be that the soil becomes very soft to walk on when it is moist. When it dries out between watering, it should become hard again. That is normal. Once you do this, you'll be helping your neighbors soften their soil. This is 100% better than any aeration. It works immediately while aeration works marginally well under the best of circumstances. Earthworms is more of a euphemism for organic matter in the soil. Worms are nice but overrated. What you really need is the beneficial fungi that earth worms feed on. Get going on that with organic fertilizers like alfalfa pellets, soybean meal, corn gluten meal, or as a last resort, corn meal. In the summer heat mow at one notch above the bottom on a rotary mower. When it starts to cool off again, then drop it all the way down. If you really want it barefoot friendly, look for a reel type mower and drop it to 1/2 inch. Contractor grade bermuda is possibly the best turf available, bar none. Why? Because it is so easy for the sod farms to grow that the price has come way down. It is much easier/faster/better for a contractor to put Tif 419 sod down than it is to seed and deal with those issues. There are sports grades of turf around which might be better than Tif 419 but you don't want those. It is never too late to apply organic fertilizer. You can use it any day of the year, rain, snow, or shine. Well, maybe not snow. You cannot over apply, as David_tx said. There is a guy on another forum who applied 50 pound per 1,000 square feet every week of the season with no ill effects. Google "Bermuda Bible" and memorize it. It was written for the chemical minded homeowner. The author comes to the regular lawn forum occasionally and is occupied on other lawn forums. He was a bermuda sod farmer for years and retired last year. At the job he was all chemicals. At home he was mostly organic. After growing bermuda both ways, the bible was written to bring the most success to the most people. David_tx has found a way to grow bermuda organically. Listen to him. Before DNA testing, compost was the only organic material anyone used. It was expensive and quite often led to huge problems in lawns. That was in the days when Rodale had control of the organic gardening movement. Since the late 1990s, the use of grain meals has taken over with spectacular results and huge cost reductions. All the issues with compost are gone. Compost has uses, but fertilizing lawns is not one of them. In fact I dare say that the only reason there is an organic lawn care forum anywhere is due to the discovery that compost was a problem and ground grains was the solution. Generally all insects prefer the more natural use of grains rather than chemicals on the soil. In a 'normal,' healthy lawn, the beneficial insects will predominate. Why? Because 'healthy' is the definition of normal. When you have the bad bugs then something is out of balance. Something is not normal. Usually applying food of some sort will straighten things out. Sometimes grains are not the fastest answer. Sometimes molasses (a food) is a faster answer. If your ants are fire ants or another type of ant that is doing damage, the fastest solution is to give them a disease (organic!). The disease is called spinosa which causes all the insect's muscles to contract resulting in paralysis until death. The product is called spinosad or Conserve (trade name). There is a bait called Green Light Fire Ant Control with Conserve. Find a trail of fire ants and drop no more than a 3-finger pinch along the trail. I use a 2-finger pinch and have some left over. Fire ants will jump on it and start carrying it to the nest. The entire nest will collapse and die within 24 hours from just a few grains of the bait. Be careful how you use it, because it is very effective on many beneficial insects (bees and wasps come to mind). Try to target your pests. There is a similar product by Fertiloam, but I can't remember the name. Look for spinosad or Conserve. What organic matter? The organic matter that matters is the beneficial fungi in the soil. The population of fungi in soil far outweighs (literally) the population of all other microbes combined. Others are bacteria, protozoa, and micro arthropods (mini insects). You can have good fungi by watering regularly, the soap stuff from above, and feeding organic fertilizer. The occasional use of chemical fertilizer will not benefit your soil but may boost plant growth for a short time. The repeated and sustained use of nothing but chemicals WILL deplete the beneficial microbes in the soil and that can be a problem.

You're doing just about everything wrong, so yes, there is something else you can do. Your watering and fertilizing plan is guaranteed to generate thatch. You're doing both far too frequently. Watering: Deep and infrequent is the mantra for watering. This is for all turf grass all over the place. Deep means 1 inch (2.5 cm) 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 temperature. With temps in the 90s (32-37 C), deep water once per week. With temps in the 80s (26-32 C), deep water once every 2 weeks. With temps in the 70s (21-26 C), deep water once every 3 weeks. With temps below 70 (<21 C), 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. Fertilizing: Once at the end of May, once in early September, and once in November after the grass stops growing but before it turns brown. Mowing: Mulch mow at the mower's highest setting. Here's a motivational photo for you. All these lawns are KBG. The green lawn follows the guidelines explained above. The others water every day for just a few minutes. Thanks to morpheuspa for the picture.

[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]

I've had this tab open for months and never got around to a reply. I realize this is the organic forum, but I'm afraid there is no good organic solution for weeds in bermuda. You could spray the weeds with vinegar, but that does not always kill the weed plant. It kills the top growth for most weeds, so if you have a healthy stand of bermuda, you can sometimes kill off the tops of weeds and let the fast moving bermuda move in, but it doesn't sound like you have a strong growing bermuda yet. The reason people in Texas and other states use Logan Labs is that Logan Labs has been vetted by many thousands of homeowner lawn soil tests, and their accuracy and reliability is unsurpassed. The only other lab close to LL is UMASS. If you live in Mass, then you can go with your state lab. TAMU labs, on the other hand, have been discredited in an open letter apologizing for decades of incorrect soil testing. Furthermore, Logan Labs provides more information than TAMU does. To get the same testing done at TAMU would cost between $60 and $100 depending on their current pricing structure. LL does it for $25. The high calcium and pH of Texas soils is well known. We live on 1,000 feet of limestone. There is no amount of acidifiers that will change the pH or calcium levels of the base soil around here. At best we can affect the top of the root zone temporarily until the next rainstorm washes away any acids that might have built up. I'm not soil test expert, but I've read a bunch of them on this and other forums. I've never seen a Total Exchange Capacity higher than 20. A value of less than 8 usually means you have a sandy soil incapable of holding onto chemical fertilizer salts. A value approaching 20 usually means you have a clay soil. I'm not sure what your values are saying. You might call Logan Labs and ask them if they think there is something fishy about that value or maybe, knowing that the value came out like that, there is another way to test the soil. It would be good to see a picture of the crabgrass you are suffering from. When I first saw St Augustine grass, I mistook it for crabgrass. While it may have some of the coarse blade appearance of crab, St Augustine is much better behaved. If you had the all winter, then it was not crabgrass. Crabgrass dies out completely at the first frost. A picture would be helpful. If you have an invasion of St Augustine, I would suggest letting it take over the bermuda, because St Augustine can easily dominate bermuda, and it is easier to manage. Now that your grass is up and growing, please post a pic.