Don't want to seem difficult but I think there is a huge difference between "on the soil" and "in the soil." At least with a heavy clay soil like I have. So far things don't seem to penetrate my soil in a timely manner unless I manually cultivate it. Not last fall but fall of '05 I put down about 3-4 inches of hardwood mulch on top of cardboard in my relatively new veggie bed. As of this year I am still coming across undisturbed spots that one can see where the mulch was and where my native soil begins. The mulch is about a 2 to 3 inch layer of compressed, really dark, really crumbly stuff while my soil is still grey and thick. Until my soil greatly improves, more worms move in, the local bacteria and fungi become more happy, I do believe there will remain a difference between "on the soil" and "in the soil."....but of course all of this is in *my* experience;-)

I think Carolyn was interested in something called Serenade. I wonder if she got any feedback on that. Some say it works great without the white residue. ***** Me Carolyn? No, I'm not interested in Serenade or Daconil or Actinovate or Spinosid or Messenger or whatever, b'c since I moved to this new location 9 years ago I'm in a very rural area and haven't had serious problems with foliage diseases. I did most of tomato growing one hour south near Albany and there I had to use something b'c of the high prevalence of foliage infections, and after researching I decided on Daconil and it worked very well. It's strictly an anti-fungal so one needs to ID if the foliage infection is bacterial or fungal so one doesn't expect miracles treating a bacterial foliage infection with Daconil. Here where I ( meaning Freda who does all my gardening for me since I have to use a walker after a fall in 2004 when I severed all 4 quads in my right leg) now live I use nothing. Carolyn

Dear Eddie, Thank you very much for your inquiry. Mulching helps if you do not have readily available irrigation, sloped ground, or germination conditions that are suboptimal. Appropriate mulches are straw and paper mulches. Avoid peat and composts with lots of peat as they will hold too much moisture. Straw is as effective as any, but any windy conditions are challenging if the straw is not wet. String spaced 4-6 feet apart and criss-crossed will hold down the mulch. A good paper mulch to use is called PennMulch (there are others that are good as well). Do not spread it on too heavily. It can put down dry, and then it will expand during watering. Again, thanks for the question and let me know if you have more. Respectfully Trey Rogers, The Briggs & Stratton Yard Doctor, YardDoctor.com

Okay I'm in San Antonio and moving to Bandera. Hold off on the fertilizer unless you want to use an organic like alfalfa pellets or corn meal. If you've never seen those flowers then you don't have buffalo. Can you take a picture on a cloudy day from a height of about 3 inches. If the grass has flowers or tassels or anything on it, that would help. You have not used the really hard stuff, but then you did use 7x too much, so I'd let things rest for a couple weeks. Today's herbicides often don't show progress for at least a week. If you have St Augustine, for example, 2,4-D will kill it. Applying anything at 7x the rate would probably wipe out St Aug. St Aug is a very hardy grass, but one weakness is sensitivity to most herbicides. It's weird. Let's figure out what grass you have before going crazy with treating it. If you water the fertilizer in immediately after applying, it should not hurt a normal grass. The problem comes if you don't water it and then the morning dew creates a very salty solution that will kill most grass (but not usually St Augustine - weird). If you have a hand sprayer of Weed b Gon, you could spray those dandelion looking weeds. Just spray the leaves - don't drench the soil. They might be thistle, which looks very similar before it flowers. As for fertilizing the lawn, I'd just enjoy the bluebonnets for a couple more weeks.