Can you plant seeds of native grasses and short wildflowers to get a meadow going? It sounds like the grass is not well-adapted to taking care of itself, so the other plants are finding it easy to take over.

That is too bad. We warn and warn and warn against spring seeding but you know who gets all the attention? The magazines and TV that put on a full court press to get your seeding done in the spring. What kills me is the availability of bermuda grass seed in March in my area. Bermuda is a HOT season grass and seed will not sprout for months after it goes on sale. Now that it is hot as blazes here, they have put the fescue blends on the shelf. In San Antonio??? Puh LEEZE! Yes you only thought you had done all your research. It always pains me to find out I overlooked something really basic that everyone else seems to know. Like, How did I miss THAT? Grass1950 got it right with the one step forward and two steps back. It is heartening to see you have a positive attitude toward a second reno in the same year. I would say your lawn as is has a shot at recovery but it will not be until this time next year that you see the results. If you reno again in August, you can have it looking pretty good by October. KBG is one of those ground covers with the following characteristics: The first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, the third year it leaps. Have patience and you will be rewarded. 1. Find the seed you want. Check the NTEP trials for your state and area to see what they like. Lean toward those but don't necessarily commit yet. Look at previous years trials for other varieties. Some are more readily available and perhaps the newer ones offer only marginal improvements. With seed you usually get what you pay for. You should pay more for seed with 0.00% Weed Seed and 0.00% Other Crop. There are a few pesky grasses with seeds the size of dust that can create the wrong lawn if you get them in your seed. Look online for seed suppliers and ask here about actual human's experiences with the vendor. Please don't look at anything that has rye seed in it. The reason takes a lot of words but suffice it to say it sprouts quickly and gives you false hopes as to your new seed. 2. If all you have is annual weeds, then don't respray the RoundUp. Just rent the power rake and set the blades to shred right at ground level. Some places the blades will not hit the ground. Don't panic. Shred the existing weeds and grass and blow or rake it all up. Then reevaluate your surface. You will still have some low spots and high spots. Use your judgement to lower the blades another 1/4 inch to dig up and shred the rest of the plants in the low spots. With this run you will also shred the surface of the high spots loosening the soil. Try to remember where the high spots were and hit them a little harder to loosen more soil. Then use a carpet or something big and relatively heavy to drag around and move the loose soil into the holes. The carpet will have enough horizontal structure to not fall into the holes itself and remove the soil but it will pull loose soil in. Drag that carpet every which way until you are happy with the way it looks. Then water it to settle the dust. I should say that you will suffer the ill effects of rototilling for 3 more years as your soil settles. Consider this a training session for the ultimate leveling you might do in 2015 or so. The reason you had bumpy soil in the first place was because someone rototilled. It is possible to have putting green perfection even at home. Check the archives here to find more on leveling the lawn. 3. Scatter the seed. Roll the seed down with a water fillable roller (rented). The purpose is to get good contact between the seed and soil. It is the soil against the seed that keeps the seed from drying out. Covering the seed with top dressing is too random. You can have large areas that don't take because the covering was too thick. Just roll it. KBG takes a looonnnnggg 3 weeks to come in to the 80% mark. Keep the moisture on as you did before for the entire time. Don't be tempted by early sprouts to back off on watering yet. At 3 weeks you should be approaching 80% germination which is about all the seed producers guarantee. 4. Once the seed is up, you can start thinking about adjusting your mowing height (3 to 3.5 inches for KBG). You can start thinking about backing off on the frequency of watering. Normal for the fall is to apply a full inch once a month. Don't apply 1/4 inch per week or 1/30 inch per day. Apply it all in one day. The reason for that is, remember how you water for new seed (every day), that is what weed seeds are looking for. Once again I need to warn you that the annual weeds you saw in August were summer annuals. There are also winter/spring annuals that you will not see. Those plants will sprout along with your grass but will not show their heads until spring. For the most part we lovingly call those wild flowers but they are traditional weeds. They are annuals and will die in late spring. Again, don't panic. Once your grass is in in the fall I believe you can apply a preemergent herbicide (not corn gluten meal) to minimize the spring weeds. You can also fertilize with organics and even chemical ferts in the fall. Tiemco will be along with more specific help on that. 5. What you want to do in the fall is get your new seeds up and mowed a few times. This will prepare the roots for the summer heat next year. You want to get it as dense as possible for 1-year grass. That density will protect your lawn from weeds of all kinds next season. 6. Early next spring you will be tempted by all manner of advertising to apply fertilizer early. Please resist. KBG will put on enough growth in the early spring that pumping it up with fertilizer is not needed. Wait until after the early flush of new growth to apply the first app. Think in terms of Memorial Day for now. You sound like someone who is going to take this lawn pretty seriously. If so you should go ahead and get a soil test at Logan Labs in Ohio. For $20 they give a much better test than any university or county extension service. Post your test results here and you will get help as to what to add and where to find the additives.

philes21, thanks! The only weed I'm worried about is what I think is quackgrass, and I've got a lot of it. As far as fertilization, I did a 1/2 shot of starter at the 28 day mark of my reno and plan another 1/2 shot in a few weeks. I have milorganite, but I think it's too late to be effective with the cold temps coming. I will then put the winterizer fert on in November for the year. Hopefully, in the spring things will thicken up a bit!

Here goes, Bart. Lavender lass, I sure wish my garden had a few horses wandering around. Fenced from the garden, of course. That's what my property was when I bought it in 1978, a horse pasture with native alder, maple, hemlock and Doug fir. I rented a bulldozer and put in a driveway and cleared an area for a manufactured home. After that was done an acquaintance needed a place to store his bulldozer. My place was the logical choice. He said I could run it as much as I wanted as long as I kept it full of fluids. After a couple of years I had dug 12 ponds and cleared a lot of land and started growing plants for my landscaping business, focusing on the not so common plants and buying the more common ones wholesale. I propagated them from seeds and cuttings. Made a lot of trades too. Along the way I kept planting trees and shrubs for myself and slowly phasing out the nursery beds. Most of them went through several moves before they found a permanent home. Now, after 35 years, I'm doing a lot of editing. That means cutting lower branches off some trees and sawing down others. I'm even turning the larger rhododendrons in to trees by pruning them to look like trees. Lately I'm concentrating on planting more groundcovers and enlarging and redoing a rock garden. Every so often almost every part of the garden needs a reshuffle. That's the fun part! I really enjoy my neighbor's horse in the pasture next door. He also raises a couple of Angus each summer for beef. Lavender lass, there IS country on this side of the state. ;-) Mike...from Peone Prairie near Mt. Spokane