Sorry for the double post...the first one did not show up until I posted the second one.

kathyga........I've written about it a few times here. Basically, the grass - and a couple weeds - in the corn gluten meal containers grew like crazy, telling me that it is an awesome fertilizer and not so great preemergent. I didn't get any crabgrass in that container, but I recall getting a really weird weed that I had never seen before and have never seen since. The most striking thing was the difference between the corn gluten meal and non corn gluten meal containers. When I dumped out the corn gluten meal container, the roots were REALLY deep and thick, causing the whole thing to come out in one giant clump, which was pretty interesting since I didn't spread too many seeds in there originally. The one with no fertilizer was pretty sparse in terms of root action.

How much for SBM for you? It's not cheap by me either. I like Milorganite and the fact that it has iron in it. Definitely greens up better for me than SBM.

CGM is an excellent organic fertilizer and a worthless preemergent weed controller. It is an excellent fertilizer because it has a high protein content which feeds the soil microbes. A few years ago my wife wanted me to apply a preem in the early spring. I applied CGM. I repeated every month of the growing season at 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. I saw no difference in weed pressure throughout the year. I applied both on the lawn and in the flower beds. If you read all the literature from Iowa State University, where the CGM as preemergent hoax began, you will see that the best results they could get with weed control was 80% and that was under very specific circumstances. The packaging on CGM weed control products never mentions this. The application instructions are vague - probably on purpose. Are you allowed to use RoundUp? If so then here's what you should do: Water lightly 3x per day for a week. At the end of a week there will be some weeds sprouting. Spray those with RU. Then continue watering the same way for another week and spray the RU again. After that you can scatter the grass seed and get very minimal weeds sprouting up with your new grass. If you don't get many weeds, you could hoe them out on the weekends. I like a stirrup hoe for weeds. If you can do that and since you will be watering every day, take note of where the soil settles. Rototilling was a bad idea and, yes, I realize the Scott's website promotes rototilling. When you rototill the tiller hits hard spots and heaves up out of the ground. When that happens the hard spot becomes an underground hill below the fluffy rototilled soil. When you level it off on top that leaves an uneven height of fluffy soil around the yard. As it settles over the next 3 years it will develop low spots where your mower wheels will fall into. The end result is the lawn gets scalped and it's no fun to mow.