This year you will likely be fine. When the bermuda comes out of dormancy next spring, the grass in the shade of the oak will not come out. That opens up all that area to some bad boy weeds. Among the weeds to watch for are clover, black medic (looks like clover), dichondra, and horse herb. They are innocuous looking at first, but become prolific. As they spread quickly into the shade-weakened bermuda, they will continue to spread into the dense bermuda shading it out as it goes. By the judicious use of Weed-B-Gone next spring, you can hold off the weeds until the rest of the bermuda comes out. Worst case is if you get crabgrass started in there, but that is unlikely because it is a sun loving plant, too. Dallis grass is another possibility. It has no trouble on the fringe of shade and sun. One thing that we're seeing happen is owners get anxious for their bermuda to come out in the spring. Just about the time the grass is starting to pop, they will drop bermuda seed. Or if they waited long enough to see it pop, they will see a weak spot (like I'm expecting in yours) in a hybrid bermuda and toss some bermuda seed in to build it up. The problem with that is the seeded varieties of bermuda are all common bermuda and not nearly the same quality of grass as the hybrid Tiff grasses. Even the Tif 419 variety of hybrid is not the same quality as your sports model bermuda. In the long run, the only turf grass that will survive under a southern live oak tree is St Augustine.

Well I am a sod farmer along the Red River on the TX side so take that for what it is worth. 1. How long should I wait before I mow it the first time? You shouldnÂt wait any longer, it is past time. I am certain you have Tifway-I aka 419 Bermuda. Tifway is best maintained between ½ to 1 inch in height. If you have a rotary type mower lower it all the way down which should be around 1 to 1-1/2 inches depending on the brand. Tifway is best maintained with a reel type that can go down to ½ inch. The other thing to remember is Tifway (all Bermuda grass is an aggressive grower and requires to be cut every few days 2. I have read that when I mow it, I should keep the level high. Is this true? No, where ever you heard that from is clueless! 3. I purchased a bag of Vigro fertilizer for new grass. Should I apply it before or after I mow the lawn? Well what does the bag ratio say? Something like 10-0-5 or what? Regardless it was the wrong type. Your very first application in the spring when the grass is about 50% green should be a ratio of 3-1-2 (15-5-10) or 4-1-2 (20-5-10). Then every 30 to 45 days should use a straight nitrogen product like 39-0-0. Lesco is in you area and has every one of these ratios in a slow release urea formulation. Lou was right about what to use, but I think the price is much lower in the neighborhood of $22 to $27 for a 50 pound bag. Box stores like Home Depot also carry Lesco in limited formulations You can use what you have for the first application and the trick is to apply 1-pound of nitrogen for every 1000 square feet. To figure that out take the first number in the ratio and divide it into 100. So for example if the ratio on the bag says 10-0-10, 100/10=10. So you would apply 10-pounds of product to every 1000/ft2 4. There are several weeds growing. Is it ok to use Weed-Be-Gone? Wait till the weather is warmed up good and the grass is actively growing before using and post-emergence. FWIW if you properly mow, water, and fertilize the weeds will disappear on there own as Bermuda will choke most any thing out.

Slclouse, Welcome to the forum. The purple flowered weed likely is henbit. The green grass is one of the cool-season winter grasses. If it is very fine bladed it likely is poa annua. If it is a wider bladed and taller grass, it might be winter rye grass. I've been pulling up clumps of poa annua and winter rye grasss out of my garden for the last couple of weeks. I leave the henbit alone for the most part because the butterflies love it so, but I'm in a very rural area where such weeds are tolerated more than they are in town. The standard recommendation for killing winter weeds in bermuda grass in winter is that you can spray them with a contact herbicide like glyphosate in January and February when the bermuda grass is completely dormant. Whether you'd be able to do that in March, even this early in March, is sort of iffy. It would depend on whether or not your bermuda grass is absolutely, totally and completely fully dormant and all tan/wheat colored or if it has begun to green up. You'll have to look closely at your bermuda sod and see if you would feel comfortable spot treating the weedy spots with a glyphosate this late in March or not. Would I do it? Yes, but then I hate bermuda grass because it is highly invasive in garden beds, so I wouldn't care if it all died. I also am far enough south that we do have bermuda that is greening up so if I loved my bermuda grass lawn, I probably wouldn't spray Round-up on the weeds this late in winter. Since you're a couple hundred miles further north than I am, your bermuda may not be greening up yet. Look closely at the stolons at the ground level and see if you see green. My blades of bermuda grass for the most part are not green, but my stolons are. Otherwise, you could use a contact herbicide that is labeled for broadleaf control in turf, following label directions. I don't know what the standard treatment is for poa annua because I garden organically for the most part and just don't worry about it. It used to be, in my pre-organic days, that they recommended an arsenical like MSMA or DSMA for many of the weedy grasses, but I haven't stayed current on synthetic herbicides since I switched to organic growing and don't even know if those still are available. A grassy weedkiller would take care of the cool-season grasses,but not the broadleafed weeds. A glyphosate would take care of both. In future years, a pre-emergent herbicide applied in the fall before winter weeds germinate would prevent these weeds from sprouting in the first place. Now that I've given you the correct answer, I'll give you the anecdotal one. Bermuda is fairly hard to kill, especially when it still is mostly dormant. I find it hard to kill bermuda grass with Round-up even when I am attempting to kill it. It will brown out and look like it is dying, and then a couple of weeks later it will show signs of recovery...and that is if I spray it during the warm season when it obviously is green. If I had the weeds you're seeing and a weed-free lawn was important to me, I likely would spot treat with a glyphosate today or tomorrow while the temps are still cool. A week or two from now with high temps in the 70s, I wouldn't do it. I'd be too afraid it would stunt the bermuda or even kill it in spots. You should be aware that spraying glyphosate on a bermuda lawn is one of those "do it at your own risk" things, and if I was doing it, I wouldn't spray any part of the lawn that didn't have weeds---I'd just spray the weedy spots. I wish you'd asked this question back in February when the answer would have been more clear cut because the grass was definitely still dormant then. That's why it is recommended to spray bermuda grass with a glyphosate for weed control only during full dormancy in January and February. As for the sinkholes, can you describe them a little better? How often do they occur and what size is each sink hole? If you stand and look at the lawn, are you seeing slight depressions that outline each piece of sod that was laid in the fall? Or, is it something more random than that? For what it is worth, many Oklahomans have red clay, although its density can vary a great deal. Some of it is almost pure clay, while sometimes it is a clayey-sandy blend that is not nearly as difficult to work with. One good thing about red clay is that it is very fertile. Unfortunately, since it compacts down tightly and dries very hard in hot, dry weather, it can be difficult to deal with during those times. Since bermuda grass is new to you, I'd just like to state for the record that in any other area than its main use as lawn turf, bermuda grass is evil! (This is not the last time you'll see someone here use those words.) It will creep and crawl and get into flower beds, shrub beds, ground cover beds and veggie/herb gardens and will take over and completely dominate those areas. The best way to manage it in non-turf areas is to prevent it from becoming established in them in the first place. Dig it out religiously the minute you see it popping up in a non-turf area. I put down a high-quality, heavy-duty fabric mulch cloth in my veggie garden pathways and cover it with several inches of mulch. When I lift that cloth in fall or winter, I'll have bermuda grass that has invaded the pathway by creeping under the fence and under the landscape fabric and often has stolons that have run 20-30' underneath that landscape fabric looking for an opening where it can grow upward and reach daylight. They are blanched almost white because they've never seen sunlight. That is how aggressive bermuda grass can be.I dig it out of the pathways and put the landscape fabric and mulch back down on the newly 'clean' pathways. When someone wants to put in a new bermuda lawn, I generally tell them that if they just will rototill their soil, amend it and plant a vegetable garden, they'll have a thriving bermuda grass lawn in no time at all. Bermuda is a great turf grass for Oklahoma. It handles our weather amazingly well. However, it is not good about staying where you want it, so be prepared to do battle to keep it out of your non-grassy areas. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: OSU Fact Sheet on Turf Grass

Bre, She was not a pleasant person---didn't make eye contact, didn't speak to anyone, always had a scowl on her face. I felt sorry for her. I believe she had a pretty unpleasant childhood and seemed miserable all the time. Would you voluntarily tell someone fitting that description that they were doing everything "wrong"? No, I did not. Her husband came over to the house one day and asked me why they weren't getting tomatoes, so I carefully explained to him (he was a very nice man) everything she was doing wrong. (Growing them in almost total shade, and she pinched off EVERY branch and limb, so that her tomato plants, which were tied to 6' tall wooden stakes, essentially looked like miniature palm trees with long skinny trunks and a cluster of 4 to 6 leaves at the top.) After I explained everything to him, he hesitated and then said something like "Uhm, I think I'll just forget I came over here and we had this conversation. I really don't want to have to tell her all this....". He knew she wasn't going to handle the news well and might 'kill the messenger', so to speak. I solemnly agreed with him "I think maybe that would be best", and it took every ounce of self-control I had not to grin or giggle. Had she been an approachable person to whom you could speak, I would have told her early in spring that she was getting her info on how-to-grow-tomatoes from a source not written for north central Texas. We bought this place and moved here not long after that, and I have no idea if she ever tried growing tomatoes again. Dorothy, The first time I grew Bush Early Girl, I put it in the garden very small and it had flowers, so I left them there. I bet that little plant produced 28 or 30 tomatoes that were ready to pick in late May and early June. After it had recovered a little from that craziness, it then bore the rest of the summer. You know, for years Early Girl was not early for me at all (though last year it was), but it always is Late Girl here, continuing to set fruit even in August when everything else slows down. Bush Early Girl is reliably early and produces just as late in the year as Early Girl. I don't think there is a plant around that beats the two of them for reliability, although Better Bush is pretty good too. I might grow a couple of plants on the sunporch for winter, but won't even try to drag containers of existing plants into the greenhouse in the fall to keep them going. I had trouble with that last year. The plants did fine, but in order to keep them happy, I would leave the greenhouse closed up during the day for the most part so heat could build up....and the heat kept the tomatoes happy. However, the lettuce I had growing in tubs certainly did not appreciate the heat and it made some of them bolt. Having to choose, I think I'd rather keep the greenhouse open and cooler in autumn/winter for the lettuce, and just keep a couple of tomato plants producing in containers on the sunporch. I just don't think I can keep the tomato plants as warm and happy inside the greenhouse as they'd like while simultaneously keeping the lettuce cool and comfortable. I always say that BEG is the only tomato plant I've ever grown that literally has more fruit than flowers, but I just thought of another one, although it is a Roma. Martino's Roma will produce more fruit than leaves, and I like the fruit fine, but the fruit on Martino's Roma seems more prone to sunscald than the fruit on BEG. For whatever reason, even though they are not well-shaded by foliage, the fruit on BEG rarely sunscald. Maybe it is because they are growing earlier in the season in cooler temperatures and less intense sun. By the time they are covered by fruit in intense heat and sunlight, adjacent taller plants may be shading their fruit enough to keep them from sunscalding. Dawn