I would prefer you wait til the second week of May to fertilize, especially if you fertilized in October or November. At least let it green up completely before if itching too badly to wait a full month. LOL A shameful reminder..... 1. Get a soil test. Call your nearest county extension service for a test kit and details. It will likely take two weeks for results. If you need to apply sulfur, lime, or any other amendment per test recommendation (that is not applied in Step 6), you can do it after seeding if you don't get results back in time. 2. Apply that "R" word stuff and again one week after the first application. You can seed the lawn one week after the second app. 3. Scalp it down 4. Rake it up 5. Core aerate (or cheat with Nitron A-35) 6. Fertilize 7. Sow seeds 8. Topdress 1/4 inch layer compost, peat moss, or clean straw (weed-free). 9. Irrigation schedule water 15-20 minutes twice a day for two weeks water 20-30 minutes once a day for one week water 30-45 minutes once a day every other day for one week water 30-45 minutes once a day twice a week for one week move into deep irrigation, increasing the time to provide 1 inch of water all over and decreasing the frequency to just once a week. Starting off, the schedule supplies roughly 1/4 inch of water, then increases that amount while decreasing frequency of application at the same time. Like practically everything that concerns lawn care, this schedule is a general guideline and should be modified to accommodate your specific conditions. The lengths of time should be modified if you have an automatic sprinkler system since that will not take as long to provide adequate moisture. So, decrease amount of water (time) but maintain frequency as is. The tuna cans test is recommended. If it is still especially warm, you may want to irrigate 3 times a day (10-15 minutes if necessary) for that first couple weeks. Your objective is to keep the upper 1 inch of soil moist and not let the seeds dry out. Baby the grass for the rest of year. Once the seeds begin to sprout, don't walk on it if at all possible. First mowing is when the new grass reaches two inches. *************** Remember that? Not to scold, but the words were to be taken literally and seriously. Just walking on it was potential damage by itself (even while dormant), but dogs don't walk like we do. They scratch, dig into, and rip whatever surface is underfoot. But the lawn was not a surface, at least not yet. While the grass had developed a root system, it was a very shallow one. I don't think it a predictable conclusion. Whether it recovers remains to be seen. If you have seeds left over, I'd get them down just to be safe. Give it a few more days first to see if it will green up. You can use Tupersan pre-m though it is very expensive. Scotts has a Siduron and fertilizer combo.

Most of those recommendations are for your "average homeowner" they are guidelines for those with little or no experience/knowledge about turfgrass. No, I'm not suggesting someone in zone 5 should follow my fertilization schedule for zone 7, nor I'm suggesting that an "average homeowner" in zone 7 should follow my fertilizing schedule - that's up to whomever wants to do that. What I am suggesting is that you don't have to follow every thing writen in lawn books because their approach to lawn maintenance is VERY conservative at best. ceighmey asked why his lawn takes so long to green up when his neighbors' fescue lawn are already green. My suggestion is based on personal experience and good observation of turfgrass during . Because I fertilize my lawn even in the winter is that I have green grass nearly all winter, and most if not all of my neighbors' fescue lawn are nearly straw color - just the opossite ceighmey observation. For many years I followed NCSU recommendation with little to no success, specially during the summer months. Trial and error, years of hard work, searching, reading, ect, and a tremendous desire to succed put me where I am today. I can finally grow grass like sod farmers do in the transition zone. I can grow grass where most people fail... Someone once said, "one size does not fit all." It certenly holds true for many things in life, what you read in those lawn books does not necessarily translate into success. The advise is solid and based on proven results, not books alone. ceighmey, where exactly in Kansas are you located?

Lawns/turf are so different from conventional gardening it's practically it's own field of horticulture specialty. It gets even more specialized on sports/golf turfs where drainage is extremely important. The grass growing on a fairway of a golf course is extremely different than how you'd manage a home lawn...and the grass on the putting green is a form of turf management science because of how low it has to be cut and the extreme amount of drainage found on it (along with the extremely high demand for uniformity, health, and quality). Unless you're starting with an initial planting of turf sod or seed it's very hard to change the soil structure without a lot of amending over a long period of time. Most management is done via chemical (organic or not) means on a season/yearly basis. Best management includes giving grass the proper water/nutrients at the proper time to encourage deep root growth. Even with the deep root growth, though, it's still extremely shallow compared to almost every food or ornamental crop we grow.

Thanks guys. I believe between the liquid iron and fertilizing every 2 weeks, that really helped it "wake up" and green faster than what I have seen in the past. Considering some of the temps, my grass wouldn't normally look like this until sometime in June. Hopefully milorganite will sustain me the rest of the year. http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/archives/parsons/turf/publications/spring.html I read the above article which had some good info. The main thing I took away from it was increasing the fertilization frequency until full green up was achieved.