Excellent! This is going to sound crazy but you can soften your soil by spraying it with baby shampoo or any clear shampoo. You can pay up to $70 per gallon for professional surfactants used in sports complexes and golf courses, or you can buy any generic, clear (not cloudy with conditioners), shampoo and get the same results. Apply at a rate of 3 ounces minimum per 1,000 square feet. Water that in with 1 inch of water as measured by tuna or cat food cans placed around the yard. In a week water deeply again. A week after that, repeat the shampoo/deep water treatment and you should be good to go for years to come. You can measure the goodness of this by sticking a screwdriver into your soil before and after treatment. You likely can't get it to go more than 1/4 inch deep. After the treatment it should go a couple inches. More treatments should set up deeper softness. Here's a summary of soil compaction. Compacted soil is soil with all the air spaces driven out of it. This can only be done with fairly wet soil. It often happens around ponds visited by livestock. It rarely happens in construction because construction people never work on rainy days. But it can happen. Soil can become hard for a different reason. In normal healthy soil there are bazillions of beneficial fungi that live there. Those little guys send out "hyphae" into the soil to gather food and water. They also swell and shrink with moisture. When they swell they push the soil particles apart. When they shrink they leave openings for air and water to penetrate. This is in healthy soil. When soil becomes dried out for prolonged periods (something that always happens in construction zones), then the fungi die off or severely cut back their hyphae. If you have ever let a loaf of bread go moldy in a bag, then you have seen hyphae. Hyphae are the hairly looking strands of fungal material. When you spray the shampoo and follow up with deep watering, you are establishing the perfect environment for the fungal hyphae to refill the soil. In just a few days they will fill up the soil just like they filled up the bread bag. Now consider what happens when you use a mechanical aerator to try and achieve the same thing. You can look at the ground and see that you only punched holes in 10% of the soil down to 2-3 inches. Fungi work in 100% of the soil down 10 inches or so and fill it with goodness to the microscopic level. And please don't be that guy who fights this by insisting there is no scientific proof. The scientific proof is there when you know what to look for. There is also plenty of commercial proof available from the people selling the surfactants. There is also plenty of homeowner proof from forum readers here and other lawn forums. This will only cost you a dollar (Alberto Vo5 at Dollar Tree) to try it out. The mechanical aerator will cost you at least $75 and it will ruin your weekend.

Get you some pr-emergence like Barricade or Dimension down for this season, then do proper maintenance this year on the Bermuda. The Bermuda should recover and get really thick and healthy. What height are you maintaining at? If you maintain the Bermuda too high it thins and allows weeds to invade. Keep it short, watered, and fed and it will form a dense carpet. Once you have really healthy Bermuda, weeds do not stand much of a chance. For weeds to cycle, they must reach maturity to develop seed heads. Keeping the Bermuda short, and you keep chopping the weeds heads off. That weakens them and prevent them from maturing. They eventually die off and that is the last you will see of them.

The percolation test is quite simple -- Dig a hole about 1 foot deep. Pour it full of water and wait... Observe whether it soaks in... Then, once it has soaked in -- fill it up full of water again and let it soak in again.. If it all soaks in within a few minutes -- you may be draining too fast and the grass dries out too fast... If it doesn't drain within a day... you have other problems.... Sometimes clay soils will soak in great on the 1st round, then will become impermeable after the 2nd or 3rd round -- as the clay saturates... It can also help point out problems in the subsoil like pure coarse sand, big rocks and hard-pans... (Gosh, my lawn drains fine here, but doesn't drain at all over there... I wonder why?) The 2nd test is outlined on here somewhere -- but it is to determine your soil makeup.. You take a mason jar about 1/3 full of dirt (No rocks and sticks).. Fill it mostly full of water.. Shake it up really good and let it sit overnight... Then shake it up really good again and let it sit again... It will separate out into various layers.. Sand and rocks on the bottom, silt in the middle, clay near the top, and light organic material on the top or floating... You then measure the layers with a tape measure and it tells you the soil makeup... These tests will help lead you in the direction of which amendments will help vs which ones will hurt... If your soil is all sand and already drains too fast.. Adding more sand won't help anything... but adding a little Clay would help quite a bit... and vice versa. Thanks John

The only thing I would add to the above is to put the grass squares into a plastic bag to increase heat and retain moisture, both of which will result in faster decomposition. It isn't necessary to add blood meal, it is simply a nitrogen source which will hasten decomposition and this can be accomplished with more readily available sources whether synthetic or organic. Do you have any local sources for inexpensive or free livestock manure? If so that is a great source. I am not sure about grass seeds, but wouldn't think it a problem if the sod was taken up well after the grass has gone to seed. Most of the time grass seed isn't viable and even if it is it is often mowed down before ripe/viable. I don't have any experience with Bermuda grass though. You can skip the nitrogen source altogether by allowing more time for decomposition. As odd as it may sound, simply peeing on the stuff adds nitrogen and that is an ever present, totally free source ;-) If you consume alcohol and are male you doubtless get the urge to hose stuff down outside after dark anyway;-)