If it is Kentucky bluegrass it will fill in. If it is fescue you need to fix it manually somehow. How often do you water and for how long? How high do you mow? This post was edited by dchall_san_antonio on Sat, May 3, 14 at 10:23

New sod needs to be watered 3x per day for several weeks. Crabgrass seed LOVES that spring watering regimen. You'll get crabgrass every time that happens. Now that your grass is in and maturing, you should be watering no more than once a week. But now that the temps are cooling off, you should be watering once every 10 days to 2 weeks. As it cools off more you will eventually get to watering once a month with temps below 70. Each time you water you should apply a full inch as measured by how long it takes to fill several cat food or tuna cans placed around the yard. Spraying RoundUp on bare soil is a waste of time, effort, and money. Yes, now is likely the time to overseed. For future reference, if you were going to have a box blade run over the grass anyway, then you did not need to scalp or till. In fact you never need to till in preparation for grass. Yes, I know both Scotts and Pennington recommend it but they're dead wrong. If you till then you will eventually be disappointed and buy more products from them to correct it. But you will not associate the problems months later to be caused by tilling. So if you get your turf dense this fall (now??), and you get your watering correct, then using pre em in the spring should be overkill. You can use it if it makes you feel better, but usually you would not need it. I have not used pre em for years (and years). Sometimes Mother Nature will give you daily rains just at the wrong time for crabgrass, so keep an eye on that.

Hahahaha. I actually ended up putting a few blue star junipers in after tearing these ones out. It took some deep digging emotionally to come to terms with it though. Try crawling around under them trying to unknot the branches with your loppers in 90 degree heat (wearing long sleeves tucked into your gloves of course.) To the OP.... You really don't have many other options. You could cut them back further and put in an evergreen shrub to block off the parts that are cut back and dead(a band-aid), or bite the bullet and remove them for good, which will make your garden look much better and is the right way to do it. Realistically, 1-2 bushes isn't so bad. I took out 6-10 6' ft tall bushes in each "batch". That ended up being 4-6 loads in a uhaul truck to the yard waste recycling center each time. I can't imagine that yours are anywhere near as tall as our though. so probably much less work. You could easily get a couple bushes trimmed out (or do it over a few weeks time filling your yard waste bin each week) and the stumps dug out in one misery-filled day. I tore out probably 8 huge tall juniper bush portions by myself in one day. The next day my husband and friend helped dig out the stumps.

Thank you houston. I'd hoped it might be ok to cut them up and sprinkle in the bed behind the liriope, around the shrubs. Appreciate your feedback.