It looks like it's about 2 weeks behind compared to other years but my 'Sapphire' st augustine is coming back with force now that it's warm. I guess it's not quite cold susceptible as I had thought, maybe a bit more cold hardy than Floratam. Still, I had a lot of winter kill that I had to remove. Still much better than Raleigh (very susceptible to fungal disease) and Palmetto (prone to SAD virus). Looks like maybe Palmetto got wiped out by hard freezes due to being weakened by virus??? Sapphire seem to be strongly resistant to fungal disease and SADV.

Otherwise it's a great looking lawn! You are still watering too much. I'm 500 miles south of you and got an inch of rain exactly 15 days ago. I watered two spots today for the first time since the rain. Most of the lawn still does not need water. At this time you should be backing off beyond the 7 days and looking at 10 or 15. With much cooler weather the soil does not dry out as quickly. Oh and the other thing you should be doing is putting down corn meal instead of asking so many questions. There is no substitute for getting it down NOW. Be sure to treat the entire lawn and not just the spots. You can't really tell how big the disease is affecting the soil. Plus the corn meal will really green up the spots you treat, so you'd go from brown to deep green.

Mammal urine is not acidic unless the donor is very sick. I'm not sure where that rumor got started. It is normally neutral. The reasons your dogs pee spots turned green is you already had the sugar on the soil. Quite often the grass will turn dead. SURPRISE! It is amazing what a little organic program can do on a very small scale, though, isn't it. The fast greening is, as was said, a sign that you need a lot more fertilizer. The sugar tells the microbes living in your soil to multiply. The urine will convert easily to plant food when you have enough of the microbes. Well, since you had sugared the area, you had the microbes ready and waiting for your dogs. Anyone who does not believe in organic lawn care needs to see your lawn. I fertilize on the federal holidays. Living in the south, as you do, I start on Washington's Birthday and apply again on Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving. The application rate I use is 10 pounds per 1,000 square feet of ordinary corn meal. I could go to 20 or 30 pounds but I don't need to. That amount normally keeps my grass dark green all year long. With soybean meal or cottonseed meal, those materials have a lot more protein, you should start at 10 pounds per 1,000 and adjust up or down from there. My second choice after ordinary corn meal is alfalfa pellets (rabbit food), then corn GLUTEN meal. If I could not find those I would haunt the local Starbucks and get used coffee grounds from them. Coffee grounds are about the same protein content as corn. The reason I line the feeds up in this order is cost. I'm going to apply at 10 pounds per 1,000 no matter which one I use. Applying less than that is kind of hard without a good spreader. So in my neighborhood corn meal is the cheapest followed by alfalfa. After that it gets very expensive for soy and, since coffee grounds are free, I'd do that. I just bought two bags of corn meal for $17.50 ($8.75 each).

Sooooo, which part of Los Angeles? So far in my informal poll, 12 years long, only one person lived in LA. I grew up in Riverside and have lived all over the Southland for school and jobs, so I'm fairly familiar with the micro climates that matter to you. You were watering totally wrong. We talk about watering deep and infrequent. Deep means 1 full inch all at one time. Measure that with your clock and time how long it takes to fill some cat food or tuna cans placed around the yard. That will be your watering time from now on. Infrequent depends on the temperature. That's where I need to know where you live. If you live in El Segundo it will be different than if you live in Pomona. Most lawns in SoCal are small rectangles. Those can be watered very efficiently with a hose and a turbo oscillator type sprinkler. And yes, I realize this advice flys in the face of everything you read and hear in SoCal, but those people are wrong. Deep and infrequent works everywhere with very few exceptions. Phoenix is not an exception but El Paso is (soil type is much different). If they can deep water once a week during the summer in Phoenix, then nobody in SoCal needs to be watering more often. Getting back to the original issue, you do not need to pull out the dead grass. St Augustine turns a golden color before it dies. It looks very dead but it will return when watered. If it turns to a dry straw color, then it's dead. St Augustine spreads when the temps are between 70 and 80 degrees. That means just about all year long if you live west of the 405. If you live east of the hills around Pomona, that means twice a year in the spring and fall.