15 yard penalty for not explaining the extent of the issue up front. I know you tried but really, words cannot convey what a few pictures can. Start with water and fertilizer. The point of this approach is to get a healthy stand of weeds and grass as fast as practical. Then kill the weeds. Some weeds will not take up the Weed-B-Gone unless they are healthy. More on the Weed-B-Gone below. Overdo the organic fertilizer. Have you read the Organic Lawn Care FAQ over on the Organic Gardening forum? I would start with 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet of soybean meal or alfalfa pellets. Repeat in 3 weeks. Watering is your critical issue. That soil does not look like it is going to absorb quickly without runoff. That means a lot of light watering with lots of pauses in between. Start by misting the soil and moving fast to another place. Eventually work your way back to the starting spot and water a little longer. Or you might try using a soaker hose in the places that are small and hard to get to. I have a killer soaker hose approach for you. Stretch the soaker out so that it is at least 18 inches away from itself. That means no coiling on top of itself. Just run it back and forth leaving 18 inches between the 'rows.' Try to keep the hose at parallel contours so that it does not have a low spot. Then turn on the faucet to a trickle. A trickle at the faucet means 1 cup per minute. I realize this is barely a leak and you have a long hose but this method will startle you as to the effectiveness. Leave that faucet running for a full week, day and night. At the end of a week if you have not covered the entire lawn with soaker hose, then move it over 18 inches and start again. When you finish covering the entire yard with the soaker, start again back at the beginning. By the way, this soaker hose does NOT take the place of regular watering. What it does is soften your soil so that it will absorb moisture quickly. The point of this is to get everything (weeds and all) growing and healthy. Some of the weeds will die out quickly because they cannot tolerate regular moisture or fertilizer. The rest will become healthy enough to die quickly when you hit it with the Weed-G-Gone. To summarize what I am saying: cultivate your weeds with the best lawn care practices (listed way above). Do this for six weeks or so. Then get some Weed-B-Gone with clover killer. Instead of a hand spray, get the one the connects to you hose. You can cover the entire yard in a few minutes. In fact it is so easy and fast you have to be careful not to overdo it. Some of the weeds will die seemingly overnight. Others will require another dose in a week. What you will be left with is grass and grassy weeds. I will not go so far as to say you will be out of the woods at that point, but it will be much easier to evaluate. My fear is you have some creeping bentgrass in there. That is a tenacious plant. It can be a nice...

Good answers, thanks. I'm sometimes hesitant to get into detail before I know if there are any special circumstances to be aware of. Here is some general lawn care advice I've learned after reading here and other forums over 12 years. This was not what I believed when I first got here. This is the accumulated advice of hundreds or thousands of peoples' experience. Watering Water deeply and infrequently. Deeply means one inch all at one time. Infrequently means no more than once a week when temps are in the 90s and once every 2 weeks when temps are in the 80s. This seems to work in Phoenix and in New Orleans. Of course in New Orleans they can count on rain for all their watering. YOUR grass might need to be weaned into deep and infrequent watering. Start by figuring out how long it takes your sprinkler to put out an inch of water. My oscillator sprinkler with my water pressure takes 8 full hours to get an inch. My neighbor's high flow, in ground system takes 20 minutes. You'll have to figure it out for your set of hoses, sprinklers, and water pressure. Put some tuna or cat food cans out in the yard and turn on the sprinkler. Time how long it takes to fill the cans. That is your target watering time from now on. Every time you water, use that time. Once you do that, start your calendar. Watch the grass (not the weeds) for signs of wilting. When you see the grass turn color to a darker green or the blades folding together, then water for your target time. Restart your calendar. When you water like this several things happen. One is the grass roots will extend and grow deeper into the soil to get the water deeper down. Two is the surface of the soil will dry out completely before you water again. That means new weed seeds will not germinate (they need continual surface moisture). Three is that certain weeds which require continual surface moisture will die out. Mowing Mulch mow at your mower's highest setting or one notch lower. Sounds like you're doing that. But mow once a week. Grass will become stressed if you mow more than 1/3 of the length of the blade off, so weekly mowing is recommended if the grass is growing. Sometimes in summer, if you get a hot spell, you can let the grass go for several weeks. Longer grass needs less water. But when you mow it back, watch for that stress from mowing more than 1/3 off. Fertilizer In your area you should fertilize once in the late spring. Memorial Day is an easy day to remember. If you fertilize when the Scott's commercials come on in March, you will over stimulate the grass resulting in a crash as the grass uses up all the sugar reserves in the roots. The grass will naturally come in at high speed in the spring, so you don't need to do anything until after that fast growth stops. Then the grass needs two more doses of fertilizer in the fall. Labor Day and Thanksgiving are easy days to remember for those. The last app should go down after the grass stops growing in the late fall. Thanksgiving is just a guideline, not a rule. Seeding For northern lawns the best time to seed new grass is in the early fall. Your early fall is August. That gives you time to evaluate the new grass and reseed if you get some thin spots. Fescue grasses will grow down in your little glen in the shade. Both fescue and Kentucky bluegrass will grow in full sun. Many people like the fescue for remaining green all winter, but fescue tends to thin out over the year(s) allowing weeds in. Kentucky bluegrass will turn brown in the winter, but it grows a dense carpet of grass and does not require annual reseeding. You can mix the two grasses if you like. I can't give you specific seed selection advice other than to say you get what you pay for in seed. More expensive seed will have much less of a weed problem. If you look on the label at the guaranteed analysis, you'll see Weed Seed and Other Crop numbers. Those should be zero or close to. Expensive seed will be zero. Hardware store seed will never be zero. This gets down to how much you want to spend. Is lawn care a hobby or a chore? If it is a chore, then go with the hardware store seed. If you want the nicest lawn on the block, then this is a hobby and you could justify spending more up front. Other stuff Aeration is generally not needed. It is very commonly done, but not needed. There are better ways to soften hard soil. Top dressing with soil or sand is NEVER needed unless you need to change your drainage. These materials can be a serious problem if you don't need them. Top dressing with compost is usually only needed if you have chemically poisoned your soil. Organic fertilizer I have been organic since 2002. It really works. Furthermore it seems to have solved other issues I was having with my lawn. The way it works is biological rather than chemical, so it is completely different. You can apply organics any day of the week, or every day of the week, rain or shine, summer or winter, and not have any problems. The only issue people seem to have is the "slow release" feature. It takes 3 full weeks to see the greening and improved density. My current favorite organic fertilizer is alfalfa pellets (rabbit chow) applied at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. You can find it in 50-pound bags at your local feed store (call first). I like them because rabbits are everywhere and they are fairly cheap this year. I scatter them by hand but the should go through a broadcast type spreader. If you can find alfalfa meal, that would be better and would go through a drop spreader. -icides Generally you should not need insecticide or herbicide. A few grubs are acceptable. When you get more than a dozen grubs per square feet, then you have a problem. Usually grubs are a late summer problem. June bugs or Japanese beetles swarm your porch lights in May, lay their eggs at that time, the eggs hatch and the damage begins. By late summer the accumulated damage finally becomes apparent. If you don't see swarms of beetles in late spring, then you likely won't have any issues. If you do, then wait a month and dig a few test holes looking for more than a dozen per square foot. Where you get into needing herbicide is when you put grass seed down in the spring and start watering 3x per day to germinate that seed. Summer weed seeds are germinating at the same time, but only when they get water 3x per day every day. If the soil dries out for days (or weeks) at a time, then you won't get those weeds. Of course Mother Nature has different ideas about when you get water.

Here is a datasheet on trimec so you can read about it and make your own, informed decision. Trimec is a herbicide formulation that contains 3 or 4 active ingredients depending on the product. Trimec has 3, Trimec Plus has 4 and the data sheet is for Trimec Plus to be on the safe side. All of the active ingredients are considered non carcinogenic and not normally toxic (to humans) in low amounts, however the material handling sheet advises rinsing the container well and then disposing of it, not reusing it. Assuming you are going to use the barrel to store irrigation water and not drinking water or any product intended for human or animal consumption I, personally, would use it if I had it, but I wouldn't drink/eat from it myself. This is just me, and I encourage you to read the data sheet and make up your own mind.

Well, hell the pot plants are grown next door! (These are actual pot plants!) Also the move was by choice. Moving from 1 1/4 acre into town. Can walk to everything! No more 2 hours of mowing just to have it grow back! I will miss my garden, but I'm looking into some community gardens nearby and some grow boxes. Also looking into vermicomposting. OTOH, I am inheriting a mature cherry and peach tree! Something different! Thatch shouldn't be a problem right away because the lawn is only a couple of years old as far as we know. I'll be asking questions on the lawn board since I have never really had a lawn! I probably won't continue with the gardener since we have such a small yard. I would say it'll take a half hour a week to mow? A few minutes of weeding per week and some raking of the messy tulip tree! Thanks for all of the responses! Nancy