I would try it. That advice for seeding in the fall is for people in the north who have to deal with snow. You don't. If you are further inland than Grossmont Center, I would reconsider the fescue, though. Back in there it's getting warmer, especially in the summer. For back there I would want to have St Augustine or a Tiff type bermuda (if you have full sun all the time). One drawback to seeding now is your new grass plants will only have a few months before it starts getting hot. If you were out by Old Town or further west or even south in National City, then fescue would be excellent (it's cooler in the summer and more moderate year round). But when you get inland as the altitude goes up it warms up and dries out fast. You might get some crabgrass by seeding now, but again, being inland San Diego is your free ride. Crabgrass needs warmer temps. Go for it but hurry. Scatter the seed, roll the seed down if you can or at least walk on all of it, then water lightly 3x per day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner time). Water it like that for 3 weeks until you have 80% germination of the new seed. Then start to back off on the watering frequency. Ideally this time of year you should be watering once per month and providing a full inch when you water. Then as it warms up, continue to water a full inch but increase the frequency to once every 3 weeks, 2 weeks, and finally once per week in the hottest heat of summer (above 90 degrees F).

Thanks for your input again. I live in a single family home...very small lot....total grass area is 500 sq ft...400 out front (east - partial sun) with a 2 car driveway...100 out back (west - full sun) with about 4-5 hundred sq ft of concrete patio...plus raised bed and misc planting area around the edge. The lot size is about 4000 sq ft. Most of the new houses around here have similar lot size. The house itself is 2000 sq ft. I just sprayed round-up in the area where there is Bermuda growing. I will wait for a week or two and then start digging the bermuda out. I think digging all 100 sq ft would be quite a bit for me as far as logistics are concerned. Why do you recommend bluegrass over Fescue...It seems like most of people here have fescue. What would be a preminum Blue grass? I don't see that around here in the nursery or big-box stores. Can I use a reel mower with blue grass? Thanks for all the information. I never cared about the lawn until I let go of my yard-person and started tending it myself. I have nutsedge under control and if I can resolve this bermudagrass issue I will be in good shape to tend my lawn and yard. Thanks, Kev

It sounds like you have a bag of fescue waiting to go. If you want to add 5 lbs of KBG to that, you will get a 91/9 blend. However, as the others noted, just because you put out some KBG doesn't mean you get KBG. It takes 2-3 times longer than fescue to germinate, so you need to keep watering for longer than most people think. Your grass will look like it is all up after a week or 2, but that will just be the fescue.

Absolutely keep watering. Fescue seed is very well characterized. It will not germinate until the second week, so next week you will start to see new seedlings. Then by Saturday you should really see it come in. By the 3rd week it should be up at 80% of germination. I strongly disagree with repeated top dressing of a homeowner lawn. Here is a picture of a yard where they topdressed 1/4-inch every year...for 40 years. You can see where it is piled up about a foot against the stop sign, and they had to install landscape edging to keep the soil from flowing onto the sidewalk. Adding new soil increases the chances of bringing in weed seeds and adds nothing of benefit to a healthy soil. If you really want to top dress with something, use 100% compost with no sand or top soil in the mix. Here is a picture of a yard that has never top dressed with any sand or top soil. This is what it should look like. Of course the types of grass are different allowing one to be mowed at 3/4-inch while the other is mowed at 4 inches, but the lack of mounding is pretty clear in the second one. If you want to save yourself some time and money, don't use compost either. The idea of compost was the mainstay of organic gardening during the Rodale period from the late 1920s through the 1990s. In the 1990s it was discovered that the reason soils were either healthy or unhealthy had to do with the near 100,000 different species of microbes living in the soil. Before that it was believed that there definitely a dozen different species which can be grown on a Petri dish and there may be as many as 50, which for some reason were not able to survive in a laboratory. But DNA testing proved there are more like 100,000 species. We are not in the transition stage from Rodale to what I believe could become known as the Ingham stage for Dr Elaine Ingham. What we know now is that simply feeding the microbes already living in the soil is plenty. When the microbes at the very surface are well fed, the microbes living in the soil below feed off of the waste products of the surface microbes as well as the dead surface microbes themselves. Those well fed subsurface microbes produce plant food in response to the plants' excretion of sugars from roots. This biological process will eventually be taught in schools, but for now it is considered "miraculous." If you want to read more about it, please click here. Get comfortable because there are at least 50 pages including the images. You can feed your soil microbes by scattering organic fertilizer or, as many of us are doing, livestock feed. If you look at the ingredients of organic fertilizer and livestock feed, you'll see the same list of materials including soybean meal, alfalfa, corn, wheat, cottonseed, flax, and other feed stuffs. Look at the label of any dry dog or cat food - same ingredients. These provide basis food to soil microbes. Food means protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and enzymes. The difference between these materials and compost is compost is the result if you allow these food materials to decompose. Whereas if you apply them directly to the soil, you get the full benefit of the food immediately (well, 3 weeks later) in the form of green grass. Mother Nature has been feeding Her plants like this for billions of years. It took us until the late 1990s to figure it out and a few more years to develop a simple plan to try and duplicate what She does. Now here is a picture of a test of alfalfa pellets used as the only fertilizer on a zoysia lawn. This picture was posted here by mrmumbles in June of 2011. The fertilizer was applied in mid May. You can see the improved color, density, and growth. I use this picture often to demonstrate that these ground grains are real fertilizers and not gimmicks. If you try this test this time of year your results will vary considerably from mrmumbles post-springtime test. Soil temps are dropping now which reduces the activity level of the microbes; however, the microbes still need food for the winter. Just don't expect to see such a miracle in your lawn right now. For many of these same reasons, I don't like core aerating either. Bringing up the cores resurfaces old weed seeds for germination. It also does not allow as much air in as you think. I used to have the math on this handy, but we've pretty much stopped talking about it. In essence, the cores allow a certain amount of oxygen to the soil. But when you have hundreds of miles of healthy but microscopic fungal hyphae opening up the pores in the soil, the benefits are much more real and even noticeable in the soil. You get these results with microbe food (the grains listed above) and with proper watering - not with core aerating. Sorry for the lecture but I really don't like the idea of top dressing with anything unless it has protein in it. Anyway I believe your seed will be fine. What you have lost is the opportunity to reseed if this does not come in or if it comes in thin. Next year, get started renovating in August.