I'm just going to suggest something completely different. Can we assume you live in Sacramento, CA? Because crabgrass is a summer annual plant that requires full sun to thrive. If you have something growing in the middle of your lawn currently, it is not crabgrass. Crabgrass is dead, Dead, DEAD in the winter and does not come back in the spring...except from new seed. Can you take a picture and post it? We can help you post it if you can take the picture. What I suspect is you have some sort of fescue growing around the edges and St Augustine grass growing in the middle. St Aug will likely be green now if you have had a mild but rainy winter. St Aug is a broadleafed, warm season, grass that resembles crab grass to the uninitiated. If I recall Sacramento, CA is a fine place to grow St Augustine due to the warm summers and mild winters. First you have to decide what you want to use the lawn for and what you want it to look like. If you are going to play football on it and let the Great Dane pups frolic, then you need different grass than if you are going to just look at it. You also have to decide fine blades (like the fescue) or coarse (like crabgrass and St Aug)? Fescue is going to need a lot of water in the summer because of your heat, but there are varieties that will work well. St Aug can be very lush, but you have to adjust to the coarse appearance. Next you should know that you don't have to have crabgrass at all. There are a couple things you can do to keep it away from your yard. First is to water only infrequently but deeply. Crabgrass seed needs several days of moisture to germinate. If you water once and let that soak in for a week or longer, the crabgrass seeds will not germinate. However Mother Nature is about to through you a curve and water for several days. When that happens your second line of defense is to have the tallest grass you and your spouse can agree to. Set your mower to the highest setting and mow at that height for a month to see how you like it. Don't judge before the end of a month because it will look straggly until it all grows up to the right height. So why mow high? Because crabgrass requires full sun to thrive. Tall, dense grass provides enough shade on crabgrass seedlings that they cannot set a good root, so they die. In this regard, St Augustine is a winner for a few other reasons. One is that St Aug is a sod-forming grass that grows very densly in full sun. Fescue is a bunch grass that grows one plant from each seed and does not knit together to cover the bare ground. Bare ground will fill up with weeds. That is Mother Nature's law. The other advantage with St Aug versus crabgrass is that crabgrass is not very salt tolerant while St Augustine will grow out into the sea if you let it. Thus you can kill any amount of crabgrass and retain all the St Augustine by sprinkling the dampened crabgrass with baking soda. The crab dies in a day or two and any intermingled St Aug is unaffected. Sac'to has a lot of options for either warm season grasses or cool grasses. You need to make some decisions about what the lawn will be used for, how you want it to look, what you are willing to put into it, and what you are willing to put on it. Then get back here with the answers and we can help you. By the way, tilling is a bad idea for lawn surfaces. It might work for gardens, but you don't have to walk on those. Tilling now will result in a lumpy, bumpy lawn in 3 years.

I'm just a novice with only 8 months experience, but crabgrass is one weed I almost never pull. Being an annual, it will die on its own after dropping thousands of seeds in late summer / early fall. So instead of pulling it, what I like doing is spraying the tops of crabgrass patches with 5 percent white distilled vinegar. The vinegar will destroy the seedheads and, I think I've found in almost all cases, will prevent the seed heads from returning for the rest of the season. But keep an eye on it to be sure. I was able to get rid of a big 5-foot by 2-foot patch of crabgrass exactly that way, and smaller patches too. As the weeks passed, I then noticed healthy grass growing in those ground areas where the once-vibrant crabgrass had initially shaded over; the crabgrass patches were receding in a big way. I had tried pulling and mowing crabgrass seedheads, only to see the seedheads re-grow after a short amount of time. The vinegar did the permanent trick though. I didn't see re-growth of seedheads after spraying with vinegar. Even a single crabgrass plant occupies a large amount of space in the soil, so if you pull the plant, all you're left with is bare soil. Bare soil is a blessing for every other weed seed species that's occupying that spot of soil--and it amazed me to see how many tons of dormant weed seeds are lurking in every inch of bare soil--they're just waiting for the sun to smile on them - Lol And some of them are far worse than crabgrass. I think it's better to have crabgrass to deal with than the perennial warm-season quack grass, or the annual cool-season henbit. Much harder to reign in those weeds I think. And they *love* bare soil.

Arrrrgh! I wish people would write in and ask about what they want to do rather than what they did. What you did (rototilling and adding more topsoil) are the two worst things you could have done. Adding topsoil to a landscape that already has good drainage can cause rainwater to back up into the house if you get too much. Rototilling fluffs the soil unevenly so that as it settles the surface becomes bumpier and bumpier - for the next 3 years. You will notice it the first time you mow. As for seeding again, yes, but do it NOW. Your initial timing was slightly late to give you some margin heading into the first frost, but if you are lucky, you might make it with more seed. I understand the wheatgrass, because it makes a beautiful turf with very low water requirements, but I believe all the wheatgrasses require full sun. It will germinate but not last long. It might make it into spring until the trees leaf out. Next time you do a full reno, here is a guide that should alleviate some of the issues that you and other people have. Note that this only applies for cool season grasses. Also note that for Atlanta this project should get going in late August with the first few steps so that you're seeding in Sept. Scalp everything down as low as possible (rent a mower if you don't want to ruin yours) Water daily for a few minutes, 3x per day for a week, trying to sprout all the weed seeds. Round Up everything. Continue daily watering for another week as before to sprout any slow germinating weeds. Round Up everything again. This double RU app will kill all the weeds you would have seen coming up among your new grass seed. Rake all the dead stuff away. Level as needed to fill low spots and holes. Slightly mound the holes to allow for settling. (Optional) Apply 1/4 inch of peat moss or compost as a bed for the seed. Sow seed and roll it down with a water fillable roller (rented). Water daily exactly like you did to sprout the weed seeds. For rye grass keep watering for 1 week to get 80% germination. For fescue water for 2 weeks. For Kentucky bluegrass, water for 3 weeks. Once you have 80% germination, cut back on watering to once a day for a few days. Then go to every other day and work your way back to once a week watering. Water more deeply to develop deeper roots. Mulch mow at your mower's highest setting when the grass gets up to 5 inches.

Apparently you didn't read anything from this forum about seeding. Well, maybe you read others' opinions, but in my opinion, you have spent too much money to get to this point. I'm going to sound very negative at first. That is not to make you feel bad, but more to deter others following on what you don't need to do. The bobcat is a nice tool for carrying stuff around, but it is not great for leveling the soil. I watched a video of a guy doing that last night - it was hilarious - like watching Laurel and Hardy trying to push a piano up the steps. The proper tool for a do-over like you did is a tractor with a box blade. That tool could have done in one pass what a bobcat might take all day to do. If you are paying by the hour, it makes a difference. New topsoil is not a solution to old topsoil. Your new topsoil used to be someone elses old topsoil. You're simply trading your old issues for different issue. Old topsoil can almost always be restored to a very healthy condition with organic fertilizer. The recommendation to aerate first, which I disagree with anyway, is so that you can drop seed down into the holes where it is supposed to sprout better. I don't get that, so at least you have not wasted your money on aerating. Looking at the current situation, spread more seed to the thin areas, walk on it to ensure the seed is making good contact with the soil, and continue watering. When the new grass is 5 inches high, mow it back to 4 inches. You don't need more soil and don't need any hay. In fact hay is a serious problem for new grass. The product you were looking for was straw, not hay. Hay has weed seeds while straw does not. All the water you need is about 5 to 10 minutes, two or three times a day. If your soil ever gets soggy, that's way too much water.