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Go to Home Depot or Lowes. Buy a bottle of Weed B Cone Max with Crab Grass Control concentrate and a chep tank applicator. Mix the WBG in the tank and spy/mist each weed when rain is not expected for the next 24 hrs and temps are below 90F. Buy a bag of 12-12-12 or 10-10-10 fertilizer or if you can't find that, get a bag of starter fertilizer and apply that this weekend and water it in. Fertilize again at the last day of September. Find a bag of 46-0-0 urea and apply at the rate of 1 to 1 1/2 lbs of N per 1000 sq ft after the middle of November.

considering you planted on the cusp of the hot season ... i think your lawn looks spectacular for its age ...

and i chime in.. to simply suggest.. your expectations might be a little high..

dandilions.. plantain ... and what looks like a crab grass.. can all be taken care of next season ...

but it think its time to lift the mower as high as it will go.. and start mowing ...

no opinion on the back.. since you dont show pix.. as far as i understand...

good luck... tend toward optimism...

ken

Thanks for all the excellent information to consider so far guys...

Also here is a photo of the back... as you can see the center is coming in much thicking then on the two sides... When they came and reseeded two weeks ago, the center had established some, and the two sides had pretty much no growth at all.

Spectacular is the right word. You're very lucky to have any lawn at all.

Here's a picture of several Kentucky bluegrass lawns. All the lawns in the picture are KBG. Can you guess which one is following the rules we talk about here and which ones are doing it wrong?

{{gwi:81154}}

The point is, KBG makes the best lawn, in my opinion. Also in my opinion it was unreasonable to ask the builder to seed an obvious spectacularly successful installation. I hope the rye does not spoil things for you.

This time of year you should be watering deeply about once every other week. Deep means a full inch all at one time. I suspect you are not doing that, so watch the grass carefully as you transition from "watering the hell out of it" to withholding water from it. The reason you have those weeds is your initial watering regimen. That is NORMAL, so you're on track for an excellent lawn. Now it's time to wean it away from frequent watering to infrequent watering. Watch the grass carefully. At the first sign of wilting, water it.

Set out some cat food or tuna cans and time how long it takes your watering system to fill the cans. That will be your deep watering time - always. Always water that time when you water...unless Mother Nature helps you out. If you get 1/2 inch of rain, then water for half the normal time.

Oh and the green lawn in the picture above is doing deep and infrequent watering. The rest of the lawns are watering lightly several times per week. There's a little more to having a lawn that great, but most people don't want to spent the extra $25 per year. Hopefully the owner of that lawn will be along soon. His handle is morpheuspa.

Excellent response dchall and greatly appreciated.

I should have been more clear, the install wasn't done by the builder I actually paid a lawn conpany to come in. Also the initial install due to being right at the start of the hot season, was intended to be Kbg/rye I quickly establish something as Kbg doesn't do well in extreme heat early on(from what they told me)

And the overseed that was just done was straight Kbg, no rye.

I really like the point about the deep infrequent watering, that is the direction I have been shifting to the last week for the front, and have seen great success, though I do need to use a can as you mentioned to get a good gauge of how much water is going down.

Based on the photos i attached of the rear lawn, which is no where near as developed as the front. What time of watering schedule should I be on for that zone.

Actually, the surrounding lawns are tri-mix (KBG, fescue, rye) and mine is the only pure bluegrass lawn. And I grow very nice marigolds, too. :)

>>What time of watering schedule should I be on for that zone.

It does depend. If you're still watering 2 to 3 times a day to get the seed to sprout, back off slowly. Go to 1 to 2 times per day, then to once a day after another week or so. A week later, every other day. Keep increasing it by 1 day between every week until you reach weekly watering (or the weather starts doing it for you as we slide into fall).

If you've already cut back, just hold it for a week and then cut it back again by that 1 extra day.

Of course, if the lawn shows signs of shock, water it.

That's about half the battle. Another quarter is mowing--mow as long as you can stand it. I go at 3" and would go taller if that weren't the top deck on my mower.

The last quarter is proper feeding. Mine's done organically as it helps drive out weeds and keeps a nice, constant trickle of resources going in. Synthetic is fine if you prefer that.

And really, that's all there is to care of the lawn. Other things are important--monitoring for and treating diseases, soil testing if something goes awry (or just to keep things balanced as I do), keeping after weeds if you get them.

Morpheus and anyone else. Do you agree with the maintenance schedule listed above.

It was fertilized 2 weeks ago. And 3 months old.

-Treat the weeds
-fertilize this week
-fertilize end of September
-46-0-0 urea in November.

Also when you say organic what do you mean by this, I'm willing to use whatever is going to be best for my Kbg, but don't have a ton of knowledge on it.

And really interested on your opinion on the weed treatment, I've heard from some that it's much to earlier in the lawns life to treat.

If it's been mowed three times, you're OK to treat for weeds. If not, hold off--the lawn isn't developed enough yet.

Although annoying, none of the weeds I see there are going to be gigantic issues, although the crabgrass will drop seeds and that's annoying. I might bite the bullet and spot treat that even if the lawn's too young.

If you fed two weeks ago, you shouldn't need to feed now (unless it was a half strength feeding, in which case you can give it another half strength feeding now and every two weeks).

Organics--give me a bit and I'll explain that. I'll post later.

OK, back. Organic feedings are slower trickles of nitrogen (and other resources) that feed the lawn gently over time and improve the soil while you're doing it. They also encourage lots of worms (a good thing) and insects that eat the feeding (also a good thing).

How much depends. It's hard to overdo it--I couldn't manage and I was slamming the soil--and I generally recommend the same number of feedings you'd do synthetically, just at slightly different times. Organics take a few weeks to work, so you have to anticipate what the grass will want a little more. That's actually very easy.

For synthetics like Scott's, my general recommendation is late May, early September, the first of October, and when the grass ceases growth for the season, as long as that's after October 21st (if not, the October feeding is fine). For northeast OH, I'd expect that you'll be performing that last feeding in early November, but the date will vary a lot either way.

For organics, early to mid May, mid August to early September, October first, and then winterize with a synthetic when growth stops (organics don't make good winterizers, they're too slow and don't decay in very cold weather fast enough).

I use plain old soybean meal on my lawn at 15 pounds per thousand square feet. For you, that'll probably also be a good option.

Strength of organics varies--soybean and cottonseed meal are at the top with around 45% protein, or the equivalent of 7% nitrogen.

Alfalfa, corn, oats, and so on are much weaker and would require larger amounts to provide an equivalent feeding. That can actually be a good thing--to transform my soil, I used copious cracked corn as it didn't overdo the nitrogen but added a lot of organic matter to the soil.

But for feeding, they're inferior. For alfalfa, you also shouldn't exceed 20 pounds per thousand three times a year due to the growth hormones in it, but that's another story.

Agree with morph as usual. Back in 2002 I looked at the ingredients of all the organic fertilizers in the feed store I was in. I quickly realized that they contained food...like the food we eat, but also like animal feed. So I looked at the ingredients on all the bags of dog and cat food. Same food with some addition of meat byproducts for carnivores. So I went home and put out a few handfuls of dog food on my lawn. It worked! Then I looked for cheaper alternatives and came across corn meal at $3 per bag. I used that with mild success, but I was not using nearly enough. Prices have changed considerably since 2002, but the idea is the same. The feed store cost of the raw ingredients that morph mentioned is about 1/6 the cost of a bag of commercially bagged organic fertilizer like Ringers or Espoma. Armed with that knowledge, organic lawn care is economically similar to chemical fertilizers.